Essentially, we subscribe to a number of databases (you find these on the A to Z list of databases on our E-Resources page) and journals (you find these on the 'journals' link on the main library page). When we subscribe to a database, our users may search it, but may not be able to access the articles they find. This could be because we only purchase access to a subset of articles from the database, or because the database only provides abstracts of articles, not the fulltext. Previously you would have to repeat the same search in multiple databases to find an article and then go to the Journals search tool to find where we have access to the journal with the article you want.
OpenURL is a standard that more and more database vendors are coming into compliance with. When a database is OpenURL compliant, and the library has activated their OpenURL function, you will see
appear with every search result. Click it, and you send the information about that one article to numerous online resources, which will then send back a result if they have that article in full text.
So with OpenURL, if a database doesn't have article access, you don't need to repeat your search in every database. A simple click will tell you if we have it in one of many online resources!
This is a new technology, and we will be progressing with it steadily over the next few months. Each database we implement, both as a starting point and as a supplier of data, needs to be individually triggered and tested. Please let us know if one of them fails to work properly. A supplier of data is improperly working if the link it provides is broken. A starting point database (called an origin) is broken if the resulting popup with links does not have at least links to catalogs for KU, KSU, and Washburn.
Keep your eyes open as you search our databases and please take advantage of this new feature!
1 comment:
I think your explanation to OpenURL is wonderful!
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