Here’s a problem some of you may be familiar with. You’re browsing the Mendeley research catalog and you come across a really great paper, or maybe you see an update from one of your colleagues pointing to something you’d like to read, only to find that you have to leave Mendeley to log in to your library’s website and search all over again to be able to download the actual paper. It’s a little jarring to switch interfaces like that, and more than a little inefficient. Fret no more, my friends. We’ve added a button to the catalog pages that will allow you to get the article from your library right in Mendeley. This feature will link you directly to the full text copy according to your institutional access rights. This means that a researcher from Harvard will click through to the article at Harvard, whereas a researcher at Caltech would go directly to Caltech’s copy.

To get started, you’ll first need to tell us which institution your access comes through. Click the My Account button in the upper right corner of Mendeley Web, and select Account Details, then the Sharing/Importing tab, or just click the picture below to go there directly.

Try the “Choose library from list” option first, to see if we can identify what access you have based on where you’re connecting from, using your IP address. If successful, you’ll be presented with an option to add a library link. If we weren’t able to determine this automatically, you can add your library manually by following the instructions under the “Add library manually” button. You’ll need to know your OpenURL base URL, which you can find in the WorldCat Registry or by asking your librarian.

Now, when you visit an article page in the Mendeley research catalog, such as this one, you’ll see a button you can use to get access via your library.

We’ve made another change to the catalog pages as well. Of course, there’s the spiffy PDF preview on pages like this, but we’ve also made some changes to the “Save to library” button above the paper, under the search box. The button now lets you know if you can only save the reference details to your library or if you can get the full text. This works great with the open access search filter. Here’s what the two buttons look like:

We’re still in the process of hooking up the OpenURL paper retrieval with the desktop client and other places you’d expect to be able to use it, such as the importer bookmarklet, but we thought you might like to start using it now, so give it a spin and let us know what you think in the comments. If you’re a librarian who has written a guide to using OpenURL at your library, drop us a note here as well.

Tags: full text, libraries, New features, OpenURL, research catalog, tips

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 at 8:00 pm and is filed under academic features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.