Frustration is the mother of motivation for me today.

I’m in the final stretches of my thesis and am doing a further literature review.

I wanted a LibX toolbar to make my research quicker and easier, but the library at Curtin University where I am studying hadn’t built one.

LibX is so magically, wonderfully useful to me as a researcher, that I took a couple of hours and used the LibX Edition Builder to create a LibX Toolbar that works for Curtin University Library. It is here, LibX Unendorsed Curtin University, Western Australia

I needed to look carefully at the way the URLs were built for their SFX link resolver, their Ex Libris catalogue, and their authentication server, but once I had that figured out it was just a matter of plugging info into a few blanks and testing, testing, testing.

THE “SO WHAT?” OF LIBX FOR ME

With the LibX toolbar installed in Firefox, if I get to an article from the web on JSTOR or any other publication to which my uni library subscribes, I can just right click on the page, enter my student number and password and get to the full text. I can even click straight through to full text articles from the references in Wikipedia.

LibX also:

• lets me search the library catalogue or federated search straight from the toolbar of my browser, without having to go to the library catalogue page.
• hotlinks ISBNs anywhere on any web page so that when I click on them, it will show the work in my library catalogue.
• inserts an icon when I browse Amazon.com that lets me click to see whether the item is in the library.
• For journal articles mentioned anywhere on a web page, it highlights the identifier, and I can click through to the link resolver (SFX) and go straight through to full text of the article if it is in the library.

I can also drag and drop any text from any page that I am on into the catalogue search box or on to a Google Scholar search box and have it search for that text.

DISCLAIMER

This in no way replaces a thorough, scholarly hard-slog database search, but it does make the casual “presearch” process a lot, lot faster and easier – and makes me a lot more likely to use the resources of my library because the library is in my space instead of me having to go to the library’s space.

I’ve emailed someone at Curtin Library to give them the heads up that I have created it…