SpringerLink Bonanza!

Posted by Danny on Monday, May 25, 2009 at 3:38 pm

This is all Stian’s fault.

Students of the University of Toronto are probably familiar with MyAccess, a sort of meta-webpage that pops up when they want to access normally restricted and proprietary resources (journal databases like JSTOR or Eric, for example) and allows them to log into those websites using their individual UofT passwords. Essentially, we need to prove that we’re associated with the university, and then, if the university has purchased a subscription to the resource, we get access.

Normally, the process involves finding the specific resource by going through our library website, into a directory of eResources, and then navigating to the one we want. This can be particularly tiresome if we’ve found a specific article that we’d like to read through an aggregate search engine like Google Scholar, because we can sit and sadly paw at the database displaying precisely the resource we’d like to access, but in order to convince it that we’re legitimate, we need to leave, log into the UofT Library page, and then find our way back again. This annoyed Stian and inspired him to put together a dandy little bookmarklet[1] which pulls up the MyAccess interface for a web-based resource regardless of whether you’ve navigated there through the UofT library system (and gives you a plain 404 not-found error if you try to use it on a resource that we don’t subscribe to). It’s very, very convenient for snapping up articles found during broad-sweeping Google Scholar searches, and can be a fun toy to try when you find yourself in a restricted space as a result of general browsing. Read more »