The Distant Librarian

If it's worth sharing, it's worth saving - Wayback to Facebook

I don't know why this particular solution didn't initially resonate with me, other than my doggedly wanting to link to THE ORIGINAL source, but with the recent demise of my locally-hosted instance of ShareNews, I've been searching for other ways to circumvent Facebook's ban on sharing news sites.

I discovered a couple of solid commercial options in ShareKit and Rebrandly that I'll keep in my back pocket, but I prefer not to pay if I don't have to. (side note: news links shared through Bit.ly and any customized rebrands of it are also blocked by FB) Next up was a locally-hosted version of YOURLs, but just as I was about to deploy that I realized the solution had been there all along, even as already noted by me:

Send the link to the Internet Archive using the Wayback Machine browser extension, then paste the resulting URL into Facebook. This method has the advantage of ensuring your newsworthy article is saved for others to view in perpetuity, should it disappear from the original location for any reason.

The extension is available for FF, Safari, Chrome and Edge, and also as an app for iOS and Android, so this should cover pretty much any platform on which you prefer to work.

Here's a quick screencast showing it in action. It's actually faster than my previous solution. The only potential drawback is that FB bans all links from the Internet Archive, but I'm sure lots of folks have been using this option since the ban began, and they haven't yet, so fingers crossed!

Oh, and other options include posting a news link to a social media site such as Mastodon or Twitter, then posting the link to that post into FB, but then you lose the open graph data that makes the post so much more fulsome. Metadata FTW!

Two simple ways to share news to Facebook in Canada

Update 05/24/24: my hosted version of sharenews was blocked by FB a couple of weeks ago. See option #1 below, or this post for a little more about it.

Update 10/3/23: both of those Sharenews URLs have been blocked by Facebook, but the developer released his code as open source, so you can now run the service from https://sharenews.pival.me/. Bookmarklet links below have been updated to point to that new location.

If you're in Canada and unable to post news articles to Facebook due to Bill C-18, here are two simple options for you.

1. Send the link to the Internet Archive using the Wayback Machine browser extension, then paste the resulting URL into Facebook. Firefox link Chrome link. This method has the advantage of ensuring your newsworthy article is saved for others to view in perpetuity, should it disappear from the original location for any reason.
2. Someone has built a page called ShareNews.ca (now ShareMyLink.ca) specifically to work around this. All it does is ask you to past your URL, then prepends the URL https://www.sharemylink.ca/ to the front of the URL of the page that you're trying to share, and, for now at least, Facebook is allowing that URL to be included in a post. If you'd like to streamline the process a bit, I built a bookmarklet that allows you to perform that same process w/o having to visit the ShareNews.ca website first. Hit the bookmarklet while on the page you want to share, and it'll prepend the sharenews.ca URL to it and place the whole thing in your clipboard, ready to share to FB. Here it is - just drag this to your shortcuts bar: ShareNews

(if that bookmarklet link gets stripped, here's the actual code:

javascript: (function () { var currentUrl = location.href; var newUrl = "https://sharenews.pival.me/" + currentUrl; navigator.clipboard.writeText(newUrl); alert("The new URL is in your clipboard and ready to post to FB"); })();

Thanks for the pointer to ShareNews.ca, Heather!

Update 9/18/23: updated link and bookmarklet to point to https://www.sharemylink.ca

New to bookmarklets? 

Link wherever you want (YMMV)

Quite some time ago, I used a browser extension called TLDRify that allowed me to highlight some text on a web page, and it would create a link I could share that would jump a person directly to the text I had highlighted. It was a way to both create an anchor link when one didn't exist, but with the added benefit of highlighting the block of text you wanted someone to see. At some point I stopped using it because several browsers threw up scary warnings to the clickee that they were being redirected to a different site, which is true, in that TLDRify actually shows your desired content on a different URL (tldrify.com).

The other day, my friend Peter posted about something called URL Scroll-To-Text Fragment, and it looked promising enough to explore. In my explorations, I think I've learned that TLDRify seems to be working well enough again that I'll likely start with that, but you may be interested in figuring out if either of these solutions might be useful to you. It seems that different browsers may play more nicely with one or the other, with Chrome possibly being the best bet, but I have gotten both link types to work across Windows and macOS, on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Edge.

The "fix" to TLDRify is that now all the browsers that are warning about the link are doing so by displaying the following at the top of the page, but otherwise the link works as desired.

So here are some links to try - how do they work for you?

• This one, created with TLDRify, should jump you to the final line of text on a page detailing MPOW's Travel Loaner Device Program.
• This one is way uglier as hyperlinks look, but you can't tell since it's still embedded as a link. It was created with the Scroll To Text bookmarklet described at the Supple.com website.
• The Link to Text Fragment add-on for Firefox creates an identical type of link, but does so with a right mouse click after highlighting the text. This solution seemed the most finicky in that it didn't always actually create the link I wanted.

More proof that information wants to be free?

Originally noted by ResearchBuzz, from PsyPost: The “Sci-Hub effect” can almost double the citations of research articles, study suggests.

The researchers found that articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were cited more frequently compared to articles not downloaded from Sci-Hub. After controlling for variables such as the number of figures included in a paper, title length, the number of authors per article, the H-index of the first author, and the impact factor of the journal, Correa and his colleagues found that articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were cited 1.72 times more frequently on average.

This would seem to me to be more proof that making articles available via open access (i.e. not behind a paywall) is a good way to get yourself cited.

New to me: Google Scholar “Public Access” feature

I was alerted to a new(ish?) feature within Google Scholar earlier this week by this blog post: What does this new Google Scholar “Public Access” feature mean for me or my work? More information on the Google Scholar site itself: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html?1#publicaccess.

From that original post:

The new Google Scholar feature is a reminder that it is all too easy to forget about open access responsibilities when you’ve already got your sights set on the next project. But researchers should keep in mind that making work open does more than just comply with funder policies — when research is more accessible to a broader audience, it has the best chance for the biggest impact. The more people who can read it, the more people who can use it, implement it, draw on it, build on it, and cite it.

Here's the page at the University of Calgary that discusses many options for hosting publications in order to comply with Open Access mandates.

Linked data types in Excel

Apparently parts of this have been around for a couple of years, but it just came on my radar last week with this blog post.

Did you know that Excel can do lookups from providers like Wolfram, Bing, and Power BI on a bunch of different data types? Only available with a Live365 (and/or institutional?) account though, but that covers MPOW. Here's the overview page at Microsoft.

A partial list (you provide the first part, Excel will return data on the second):

• Food: calories, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, nutrients, etc.
• Exercise: exercise types and calories burned.
• Locations: zip codes, economic data, airports, schools, forests, etc.
• Universities: graduation rates, tuition, student body, etc.
• Chemistry: elements, compounds, and minerals.
• Space: planets, moons, satellites, supernovas, space missions, etc.
• Movies: actors, characters, directors, release dates, poster art, etc.
• And More: music, plants, animal breeds, famous people, languages, etc.

I was going to do a little screencast, but there are good ones already out there.

You can even define your own data types.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with this, but at least now that I know about it, I'll keep my thinking cap on!

Available Reads is like Library Extension lite

I just added the Available Reads browser extension, and really like the feature to sort my Goodreads titles by availability on Overdrive. But for even more information on additional sites (like Amazon), Library Extension still takes the cake. Some screen shots featuring the two extensions: (click to embiggen for details)

An RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page

I got tired of there not being an RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page, so I made one. You can use it too! https://feed43.com/8203235035481320.xml

Some Sci-Hub stuff

Sci-Hub popped up a couple of times today, along with a link to a tool I hadn't seen before.

1. Tools to liberate scholarly articles, help sources understand journalism and publish printable online zines. Mentioning the existence to journalists
2. They Know We Know They Know: Does Sci-Hub Affect Library Subscriptions? which in turn led to the
3. Sci-Hub Stats Browser, which is a dated snapshot of just how comprehensive the Sci-Hub database is. This is data supporting the article, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.

Wow.

Some thoughts on citations in the 21st Century

Colleagues at work pointed to this long read on Medium: Open Access Knowledge: Digital Style Guide. In it, Patrick Dunleavy makes the case that, whenever possible, academic citations should point to "free" online versions of resources rather than the archaic "dead tree" version seemingly favoured by traditional style guides. He also argues that in addition to "real" open access repositories, if the material is available on ResearchGate, Academia.edu or Mendeley, go ahead and throw in a link. The idea is that whatever gets the material into the hands of the reader is what should be included in the citation (or alternate citation, which he suggests adding). Fair enough, but why not go ahead and include some sort of link to SciHub too? :-)

One of the other arguments he makes is to drop the practice of abbreviating author names and journal titles in the citation, and I wholeheartedly agree. Why, then, does he suggest abbreviations to describe the type of access? ([OAg] [PW] [LEV] [Non$] etc.) Spell those suckers out too! If you're going to stick with them though, why not substitute the $ for PW - I think it's clearer.

The second interesting citation-related post comes from Jon Udell, who suggests How to improve Wikipedia citations with Hypothesis direct links. Hypothes.is is sort of like a URL-shortening service, but with the ability to annotate text as well. Hey wait a minute, Hypothes.is could be used to perfectly solve the issues mentioned in points 9 and 10 of Dunleavy's post! Seriously, click this link!

I love it when stuff like this mashes up. I'm now off to make sure Patrick and Jon know about each other!

Bookmarklet to convert open.canada.ca JSON to HTML

Somewhere along the line I subscribed to the JSON feed of the Govt. of Canada Open Data releases, so I get something that looks great in my Feedly list:

But when I click through I get the JSON data instead of the actual HTML descriptive page with pretty separate download the CSV etc buttons. 

Too lazy to figure out what the actual HTML RSS feed is, I wrote a quick bookmarklet that will simply re-write the URL to get me the page I want. This post is mostly for me, but hey, if you find it useful knock yourself out! ;-)

Amazon.ca now supported by Library Extension for Chrome

Following up on a post from earlier this summer, the developer of this excellent extension for Chrome has now updated it to include Amazon.ca. (And the University of Calgary) Remember to choose your library(ies) from the Options menu in Tools / Extensions:

OCLC's Results from the International Linked Data Survey for Implementers

OCLC's Hanging Together blog has just concluded a really interesting series of posts analyzing the responses they got to a recent survey on implementation of linked data projects. If you're at all interested in the semantic web, you really should check out the series:

Many thanks to all of you who participated in the international linked data survey for implementers or disseminated the survey link! I’ve been summarizing the results in a series of HangingTogether posts, which just concluded today: 

• Linked Data Survey results 1 – Who’s doing it
• Linked Data Survey results 2 – Examples in production
• Linked Data Survey results 3 – Why and what institutions are consuming
• Linked Data Survey results 4 – Why and what institutions are publishing
• Linked Data Survey results 5 – Technical details
• Linked Data Survey results 6 - Advice from the implementers

 At the end of the last post is a link to the spreadsheet with the compilation of all survey responses (minus the contact information which we promised respondents we’d keep confidential). Feel free to apply your own filters to the responses, or look at them more closely.

We also updated OCLC Linked Data Research activity page to include the link to the above spreadsheet and the hangingtogether blog series (the sixth one to be added soon) so they’re all in one place.

ERIC Webinar: Restoring Access to ERIC's PDFs

In August 2012, ERIC temporarily disabled access to its collection of full text documents due to personally identifiable information found in some of its older documents. Over the past two years, the ERIC team has worked to clear and re-release many of the documents.

 

ERIC will be hosting a webinar on September 16, 2014 from 1:00–2:30 p.m. EDT to answer many of the questions that have been asked about this process, such as: 

• Why did ERIC remove access to full text documents?
• What process did the ERIC team use to restore the PDFs?
• Why did it take almost two years for ERIC to restore the documents?
• What are the next steps?

Please email [email protected] to register. Additionally, if you have specific questions, please email them in advance to ensure that it will be answered in the webinar.

Calgary Public Library now supported by Library Extension (Chrome)

Yay, the Chrome Library Extension now supports Calgary Public Library. When you're on Amazon.com (not Amazon.ca though), a small box will appear to the right to tell you whether you could borrow a book you're looking at from CPL, either in paper or via Overdrive. 

I've asked that the UofC be added as well, and enquired about support for Amazon.ca

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