I've got two simple questions but first a long statement of background
so you know why I'm asking. If you're in a hurry, feel free to skip to
the questions.
== Background ==
We've got a research group on campus that has built up an annotated
bibliography of literature in their topic of study over the years, which
graduate students have carefully organized according to a taxonomy of
topics. They are happy to continue to host this bibliography online as
a searchable database.
However, they've asked us in the library to help them think through what
it would mean for them to help people reach the full text when available
online (often through licensed library resources). Supporting users at
our institution is easy -- we can prepend the proxy server string to the
DOI, or query our link resolver, or query our library discovery product.
But I'd also like to offer some options for what they could do to help
users not at our institution.
Including a hyperlinked DOI or other publisher-provided permalink will
allow users at other institutions who are on campus and using VPN to
reach the resource directly, assuming their institution subscribes. So
while that's an easy solution, it only helps certain users.
In brainstorming with a colleague, we've come up with two other options
that we might offer to the research group for helping users at other
institutions reach the full text:
a) They could recommend that users install LibX and then use its "magic
button" feature to select the citation and search for it through their
institution's library.
b) They could build queries that go to Google Scholar and suggest that
Google Scholar users configure "library links" in order to prepend their
institution's proxy server link or send them to their link resolver.
While I know that Google Scholar's database includes plenty of bare
citations (without any links to full text), I'm not sure it's big enough
to actually include the sorts of book chapters and possibly obscure
journal articles found in this bibliography. But I'm content to leave
that to the research group to experiment with.
== The questions ==
1. Does anyone have a sense of the number of institutions with
"editions" for LibX versus the number of institutions with "library
links" set up in Google Scholar? I can't find full lists on the
websites of either, but if we know that one is more comprehensive than
the other, I'd just as soon recommend that.
2. Are there other options you'd suggest besides LibX and Google Scholar
(with "library links") for helping people people find a library-licensed
version of a resource when you don't know what institution the user is at?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
Kevin
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