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From the beginning our OpenURL resolver has had a non standard feature of returning metadata in response to a request instead of redirecting to the referrent. This feature returned one of our older XML formats which is a bit limited as to the fields it contains. Sometime after our resolver was deployed we introduced a more verbose XML format for DOI metadata called ‘UNIXREF”. This was always available to regular queries against the Crossref system but was never introduced to the OpenURL resolver (for no particular reason).

OK, after a number of delays due to everything from indexing slowness to router problems, I’m happy to say that the first public beta of our WordPress citation plugin is available for download via SourceForge. A Movable Type version is in the works.

And congratulations to Trey at OpenHelix who became laudably impatient, found the SourceForge entry for the plugin back on February 8th and seems to have been testing it since. He has a nice description of how it works (along with screenshots), so I won’t repeat the effort here.

Having said that, I do include the text of the README after the jump. Please have a look at it before you install, because it might save you some mystification.

I just ran across the final report from the CLADDIER project. CLADDIER comes from the JISC and stands for “CITATION, LOCATION, And DEPOSITION IN DISCIPLINE & INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES”. I suspect JISC has an entire department dedicated to creating impossible acronyms (the JISC Acronym Preparation Executive?) Anyhoo- the report describes a distributed citation location and updating service based on the linkback mechanism that is widely used in the blogging community. I think this is an interesting approach and is one that I talked about briefly (PDF) at the UKSG’s Measure for Measure seminar last June.

BISG and BIC have published a discussion paper called “The identification of digital book content” - https://web.archive.org/web/20090920075334/http://www.bisg.org/docs/DigitalIdentifiers_07Jan08.pdf. The paper discusses ISBN, ISTC and DOI amongst other things and makes a series of recommendations which basically say to consider applying DOI, ISBN and ISTC to digital book content. The paper highlights in a positive way that DOI and ISBN are different but can work together (the idea of the “actionable ISBN” and aiding discovery of content).

The recently discussed (announced?) Google Knol project could make Google Scholar look like a tiny blip in the the scholarly publishing landscape. I love the comment an authority: “Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

Dan Cohen at Zotero reports (Zotero and the Internet Archive Join Forces) on a very interesting tie up that will allow researchers using Zotero to deposit content in the Internet Archive and have OCR done on scanned material for free under a two year Mellon grant. Each piece of content will be given a “permanent URI that includes a time and date stamp in addition to the URL” ( would Handle or DOI add value here?

After a busy Online Information conference, Friday was the STM Innovations Meeting in London (presentations not online yet). There was a very nice selection of tea which helped get the morning off to a good start.

Patricia Seybold kicked off with a review of Web 2.0 that mentioned lots of sites and some good case studies:

Alexander Street Press (https://alexanderstreet.com/) - user tags combined with a taxonomy.

Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net) - share presentations

Threadless (http://www.threadless.com/) - design and vote on t-shirts

The most interesting parts of the talk were the case studies of how National Instruments and Staples have built a vibrant community of customers. Staples invited top purchasers on the their site to create product categories and sales went up 30% and now they use the categorization in physical stores and customer reviews from the web are used in stores.

The OASIS Search Web Services TC has just put out the following document for public review (Nov 7- Dec 7, 2007): _Search Web Services v1.0 Discussion Document Editable Source: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.doc PDF: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.pdf HTML: http://docs.oasis-open.org/search-ws/v1.0/DiscussionDocument.html From the OASIS announcement: “This document: “Search Web Services Version 1.0 - Discussion Document - 2 November 2007”, was prepared by the OASIS Search Web Services TC as a strawman proposal, for public review, intended to generate discussion and interest.

This message posted out yesterday on the dc-general list (with following extract) may be of interest: _“Public Comment on encoding specifications for Dublin Core metadata in HTML and XHTML 2007-11-05, Public Comment is being held from 5 November through 3 December 2007 on the DCMI Proposed Recommendation, “Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements” «http://dublincore.org/documents/2007/11/05/dc-html/» by Pete Johnston and Andy Powell. Interested members of the public are invited to post comments to the DC-ARCHITECTURE mailing list «http://www.

Well, Howard already blogged on Nascent last week about the STIX fonts (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange) being launched and now freely available in beta. And today the STM Association also have blogged this milestone mark. So, just for the record, I’m noting here on CrossTech those links for easy retrieval. As Howard says: “I recommend all publishers download the fonts from the STIX web site at www.stixfonts.org today.” (And for those who want to see more of Howard, he can be found in interview here on the SIIA Executive FaceTime Webcast Series.