The WAG the Dog Web Localizer
(Via Web4Lib) Ross Singer is working on something he is calling the Web Localizer. His project page has this description:
The Web Localizer is an attempt to create a framework that takes web resources that are not written or intended for your use or community and rewrites them so they can work within your controlled environment. The goal is to extend the library (or any service, group, community or individual that can define its relation to other objects on the web) into the places and interfaces that people are already using (and probably are not "endorsed" or "supported" by the library). Google Scholar or Elsevier's Scirus are perfect examples of these sorts of services. ...
My overarching plan is to deemphasize the importance of "the library website" and instead push our content contextually out to users in the places they would think to look. Ah, I notice you just searched for "Hegel's Dialectic" in Wikipedia (which, oddly, has no matches). This search would return 3 results in our catalog. It also returns 253 results from our metasearch application. Would you like to see those results? ...
Similarly, it makes little sense for a link to a resource on an external web page (say, a subject guide from MIT) to deny me access to a resource that my library has rights to, simply because the link goes through the remote site's proxy server instead of my own. The localizer addresses this problem, as well.
He has prototype of his concept that localized search results from Google Scholar. It is available for download on the SourceForge Google Scholar Localization Project. The GS Localizer allows libraries to modify Google Scholar search results by
- passing links to full-text through the library's proxy server (such as EZProxy) and
- adds an OpenURL 0.1 button to link to the library's link-resolver
Posted by Tom on January 31, 2005
