[LIS-Forum] Open URLs for Library Users

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Tue Aug 2 13:01:26 IST 2005


Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 10:03:19 +0530
From: Farooque Shaheen <Farooque.Shaheen at caritor.com>

Some Web visionaries have concocted a scheme to embed complete citation
information in Web pages. Inspired by U.K. researcher Dan Chudnov and
other innovators, Eric Hellman, Ross Singer, and others have invented
COinS, which is short for ?ContextObject in Span.? (?Span? refers to the
HTML tag used to embed COinS metadata.) The team has created a
specification and defined it at http://ocoins.info.
COinS seeks to address a fundamental problem: Imagine you are searching
Google Scholar or a blog or a random Web site, and you find a citation to
an article that is critical to your work. The article isn?t freely
available on the Web, but it is syndicated to one or more full-text
resources. You are affiliated with a company or a university that has
licensed the journal for online delivery via a content aggregator. You
just want to click on the citation and see the full text of the article;
you don?t want to have to go to your library?s home page and start your
search all over again. COinS is an attempt to address this problem.
COinS allows content providers to publish sufficient metadata so that you
can click on a hyperlink and (assuming your local institution has licensed
a database that includes the journal in its collection) seamlessly
download the full text of the article in question. The OpenURL standard
defines a scheme to transport metadata about a cited work?author, title,
etc.?over the Web. COinS defines a way for a Web content provider to embed
bibliographic metadata into an HTML document.
Last week, Openly Informatics announced an implementation of COinS as a
plug-in to the Firefox browser. If a user visits a Web site that has a
COinS-compliant citation, the plug-in allows the user to retrieve the
relevant article from the locally licensed database with a click or two.
The new plug-in is available at http://www.openly.com/openurlref and is
compatible with Google Scholar.
Source: http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb050801-1.shtml


Thanks & Regards,
Farooque Shaheen,
Caritor India Pvt Ltd.
Tel. 080-26678388 # 4105
Mobile-9342507449



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