BIBLIOTHEKE

Now this is pretty cool. Created by Ross Singer at Georgia Tech, it’s a bit more advanced than other methods both in that it’s not limited to a particular browser (uses a bookmarklet, which I am not really a fan of, however) and that it does a number of functions, as outlined on the page:

• Links to hosts that are available through our EZProxy server should be proxied.
• Books are checked to see if they are held locally, both in GaTech’s catalog and the GIL Universal Catalog.
• Articles and citations are checked against SFX to see if there are fulltext holdings.

He also makes a number of extremely good points in the process of introducing it, including:

Library websites and resources tend to be awkward and non-intuitive (for many reasons, certainly one of which is the rather wide diversity of content and services libraries provide) and most likely wouldn’t be the first location that springs in a user’s mind when trying to solve problems while on the web. My overarching plan is to deemphasize the importance of “the library website” and instead push our content contextually out to users in the places they would think to look. Ah, I notice you just searched for “Hegel’s Dialectic” in Wikipedia (which, oddly, has no matches). This search would return 3 results in our catalog. It also returns 253 results from our metasearch application. Would you like to see those results? And so on.

and

[Regarding approaches to localization] Service Autodiscovery, which is the ideal, but requires cooperation on the part of the content provider. Let me go on record as saying this is probably one of the more important proposals to aid in the effort of keeping libraries relevant.

True that.

Seen on Making Links

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