This is a long overdue function. For years while course reserves shifted from paper to electronic libraries and librarians have ignored the difficulty users face when linking to online resources. There is no one sure fire way you can tell your faculty (who already work well beyond 40 hours on teaching, research, and community service) "Do this" and it works every time." Instead we have to teach them what a proxy prefix is, what a digital object identifier is and that needs a prefix added, too, that only sometimes will the link from the URL locator bar work. The link to get students to an article, ebook, or video is in different places for different vendors and called something different for each vendor. It is the tower of Babel out there. Time to write a third party solution that's easy for faculty to use and works more than 90% of the time, or, educate vendors on what a problem this is for their clients. My experience is many librarians and administrators don't understand this problem in practical terms. Time to fix this.
Anonymous
This is a long overdue function. For years while course reserves shifted from paper to electronic libraries and librarians have ignored the difficulty users face when linking to online resources. There is no one sure fire way you can tell your faculty (who already work well beyond 40 hours on teaching, research, and community service) "Do this" and it works every time." Instead we have to teach them what a proxy prefix is, what a digital object identifier is and that needs a prefix added, too, that only sometimes will the link from the URL locator bar work. The link to get students to an article, ebook, or video is in different places for different vendors and called something different for each vendor. It is the tower of Babel out there. Time to write a third party solution that's easy for faculty to use and works more than 90% of the time, or, educate vendors on what a problem this is for their clients. My experience is many librarians and administrators don't understand this problem in practical terms. Time to fix this.