Using COinS to Share Citations

Posted on Friday July 29, 2005@02:53PM

While OpenURL resolvers like the ones produced by SFX make it easier for libraries to share citations with their users, there is still no common or easy way for a person to include a citation in a web page that will easily link to *all* libraries that have an OpenURL resolver. For example, this link is useful to those at the University of Windsor but not to librarians at other OCUL libraries. But recently a group of like-minded folks have gotten together to work on a common solution to this problem and the result of their work is called COinS.

"COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple, ad hoc community specification for publishing OpenURL references in HTML" [dchud].

From my basic understanding, COinS works like this: The author of a web page inserts an OpenURL citation in the span field of the page's html code. This means that, by default, the average user will not see the OpenURL citation. But, those users who have downloaded a COinS bookmarklet or have a Firefox extension that automatically recognize COinS code, will have their personalized links that will point to their library's OpenURL server.

I've tried using the COiN compatible Openly OpenURL Firefox extension and it works like a charm.

But I believe that the success of this venture will depend on whether many authors and database vendors take up the cause and embed COinS OpenURLs into their web pages. In order to make this process as painless as possible, Peter Binkley of The University of Alberta has created a COinS OpenURL plug-in to make it easy to add such citations to those bloggers who use WordPress. I hope to try this out soon!