LibX - DOI for Dummies

Ok, right up front, the dummy is me.  It might be you too, but I'm only talking about me here.

Earlier this year, David, our Integrated Systems Manager, put together a U of Calgary beta version of LibX, a Firefox Extension for Libraries.  LibX does all sorts of neat things, but I was finding it a little clunky in my toolbar area, so wasn't in love with it.  David suggested I could not display the toolbar (just uncheck it from the View/Toolbars area) and I'd still get all the goodness of things like right-click context menus and dynamically-generated links (all ISBNs are hyperlinked, special visual cues on Amazon.com and Google Scholar, and stuff like that).  It's a pretty nifty extension, and if you know the right values for your catalogue and open-URL resolver, apparently not terribly difficult to build.

Ok, so that's all fine and dandy and useful, but a couple of weeks ago I was listening to Jon Udell's interview with Tony Hammond about digital object identifiers, and I so wanted to fully understand them (DOIs).  I thought I was close, but I couldn't figure out how they were useful in my world of creating persistent links for faculty (or teaching them how to do it for themselves).  I thought "maybe adding our EZProxy prefix to a DOI would do something" but EZProxy seems to want URLs, not DOIs. I saw DOIs on many citations, but wasn't figuring out how I could use them.

Then yesterday a blog post I read included a DOI and I noticed it was hyperlinked thusly: http://sfx.exlibrisgroup.com:9003/calgary?id=doi:10.1038/445567a&sid=libx:ucalgary and of course it was LibX that stuck in the SFX prefix.  The sid bit on the end isn't even necessary, all that's needed is http://sfx.exlibrisgroup.com:9003/calgary?id=doi:10.1038/445567a and bingo, SFX provides a link to our copy of that article!  Of course!!!  SFX is what knows about our local holdings! 

So now I'm on a crusade to introduce LibX to our faculty, and show them how easy it is to build a persistent URL using SFX and DOIs.  This comes at a great time, as in two weeks I'm co-presenting at our Teaching and Learning Centre on the topic of building persistent links.  If I can get away w/o having to actually explain what a DOI is, this could be great.

Technorati Tags: DOI, SFX, Linking