Science Library Pad

Del.icio.us Toolbar for Firefox

The guys at del.icio.us have launched a “very preliminary del.icio.us firefox toolbar at http://del.icio.us/toolbar/

via loose wire: The Firefox Del.icio.us Toolbar.

Google toolbar for Firefox

Google has release a toolbar for Firefox

http://toolbar.google.com/

They have also released two other Firefox extensions

http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/

One lets you send web pages via SMS message to US cellphones,
and the other provides auto-suggest as you type your search query.

via Slashdot /.

UPDATE 2005-July-10: One of the features I like about the toolbar is the capability to open searches in a new tab.  Go to Options->Search and select "Open search results in a new tab".

OPAX - make the OPAC bow to the power of XUL

I just ran across this in a Google search

OPAX - The XUL OPAC Browser

See discussion in From Ghostbusters to libraries: the Power of XUL (Word document).

Also published in Library Hi Tech, vol 23, no 1, 2005.

ILI2005 - talk on browser extensions

I will be presenting at Internet Librarian International 2005, in the Global Best Practices track.
I will be talking about using browser extensions to add functionality to web pages.
It will be a 15 minute spiel, so I will be just covering a few areas quickly and providing lots of reference info.

Global Best Practices: How to Enhance Access with Browser Extensions, 10 October 2005, 15:15-15:30

The venue is the Copthorne Tara Hotel (London, England).
The Hotel Fact Sheet (PDF) says

* High speed internet access in Club rooms [this appears to be a room type].
* Wi-Fi Connectivity and internet points in lobby.
* Multiple broadband internet access in both function suites [conference rooms] with
Wi-Fi connectivity and full audio visual support.
* cafexpress - in house coffee shop; a light, airy and thoroughly
modern space with wide screen T.V, Internet access and a delicious
selection of freshly-made sandwiches and light bites

There doesn't seem to be a formal blogging plan.  I am told

about blogging the event.  We don't have any formal plans to do so right now, but a number of bloggers will be there, plus we are running a full-day track on collaboration, blogs, wikis, etc.   I am certain the conference will be covered in the blogosphere one way or another.

I have set up a wiki for the conference since I will be vacationing in the area anyway and need to gather some information.  Anyone else going and interested in the conference blog / wiki planning?  There's not much content there yet, the URL is

http://ili2005.xwiki.com/

XWiki actually provides both wiki and blog functions, I'm also going to look into the Web Services possibilities (particularly pulling photos in from Flickr.)

As indicated on my conference plan and in the (open for anyone to edit) list of library conference tags, the proposed tag is ILI2005.

Jon Udell screencasts about library web rewriting

Jon Udell rocks my world.
I particularly like the casual way he says "I wrote a script to access my Amazon Wish List, check if the books are available in my local library, and make an RSS feed of the available books that I suck into Bloglines."

Overall he explains and shows far more clearly than I ever could how you can use web page re-writing to get your content where your users are.  (Taking LibraryLookup a step beyond to inserting links directly into Amazon result pages.)  He even takes an additional leap, doing pre-resolving of information.  What do I mean by that?  Most current resolver implementations have a button you click, and then that gives you some links, and then, maybe, you finally find out if the thing is actually available.  But Udell clearly sees that the computer should do all this work.  If the book is available, he shows a link.  If it's not, he doesn't show a link.

The whole thing is bloody brilliant.

Jon Udell: Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation

metapages - add your own content to web pages

Simon Wilson writes about Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary.

He describes using it to inject additional content on-the-fly onto webpages you are using.

The latest release of the swiss army knife of Firefox extensions adds support for cross-domain XMLHttpRequest calls from greasemonkey scripts. What that means is that you can create a user script (a short JavaScript that will be executed whenever your browser loads specific pages) that can then pull extra data in from another server. This new ability is described in the greasemonkey documentation.

found via trendalicious

books on hacking Firefox

O'Reilly - Firefox Hacks by Nigel McFarlane.  ISBN 0-596-00928-3.

It looks like the following will be a more general Firefox intro books
PH PTR - Firefox and Thunderbird Garage by Marcia Knous and others.  ISBN 0131870041.  Two sample chapters available.
O'Reilly (Sitepoint) - Firefox Secrets

Related articles:
Slashdot Firefox Hacks /.
PH PTR Firefox Beyond The Box

HALbar library toolbar

Chris King has mentioned this in a comment before, and also in an email, so here it is.

Appalachian School of Law (ASL) Firefox toolbar for Holston Associated Libraries (HAL) catalog.

It provides a toolbar, but it also has right-click functionality (you can highlight titles, authors, keywords, or ISBNs and have the extension "smart search" the library catalog).

CISTI bookmarklets

Stephen has released two bookmarklets with source code: Proxify CISTI and Highlight CISTI.
Scroll down on his Firefox Tools page to get them.

The way I use these in Firefox is to turn on the bookmarks toolbar (use menu View->Toolbars->Bookmarks Toolbar) and then just drag the links to the toolbar.  Then you can use them just like a clickable button.

UPDATE 2005-Dec-22: Visit CISTI Lab for the latest bookmarklets.

Firefox extension for Maldura Library

In case you missed it in the comments, Gianluca Drago has done a sophisticated Firefox toolbar for the Maldura Library, University of Padua (Italy).  He has also linked to lots of useful Firefox development resources on that page.

Maldura Library Home Page (English)

The Maldura Library is one of the major libraries of the University of Padua and is entirely devoted to humanities collections, covering: Romance languages and literatures (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Rumanian), Linguistics, Dialectology (especially Italian) and Popular Traditions, Theatre and the Performing Arts.

Who controls Google? You do!

Bibliotheke reports on the Butler Firefox Google enhancer.

CISTI experimental sidebar 0.2

Ok, so you can get the latest CISTI sidebar extension from Stephen (scroll down on his page and you will see the link to click).

Following on my previous posting: we have code that will change what's displayed on the web pages you are visiting.  There are a number of ways I can think of that you can modify page content:
- highlighting terms of interest
- making new links
- rewriting links

We do all of those.  There are also different ways to think about linking into your library.  You might have a resolver, in which case you can suck up data from the page and build OpenURLs.  Lacking that however, you can always try to search into your library.  For example, identify ISBNs and build links that do an ISBN search on your catalog.  Or in the case of Google Scholar, since it provides fairly limited metadata, I have built an example based on a lot of great earlier work, that takes the title, author, and journal and uses it to build a search into EJOS.  If you have a similar system that can take that same set of metadata and take you somewhere interesting (e.g. fulltext) you could do the same thing.  The EJOS search is still very beta, it's a hack.

alt-o says "add OpenURL to Google Scholar", that's actually the EJOS search thing - it's very specific for CISTI
alt-r will highlight the search terms on the page (on my screen the highlighting is pink) as well Research Press content in yellow (if it can - it needs a direct RP link)
alt-p rewrites links to go through the CISTI proxy

An example using the page modification features would be go to "Other Search", do a Google Scholar search on balsam fir.  Then press alt-r and you will see both highlighted search terms as well as highlighted Research Press articles.  You can then press alt-o and it will add links to search into CISTI's EJOS repository (which is only available inside NRC).  You can then, last but not least, press alt-p and when you check the links on the page, you will see they now ALL go through the CISTI proxy (it currently rewrites every single link on the page).

These don't appear to work on Firefox Mac but are fine in Firefox Windows.

Please let us know if you have any suggestions or concerns.
For example, it's maybe a bit wider than it should be.  Anyway, you can drag the sidebar width bar according to your wishes.

alt-c will bring up the sidebar on Windows and the Mac, depending on where the input focus is (for example if you're already in the address bar on the Mac, alt-c will give you a ç rather than the sidebar)

You can also select the sidebar from View->Sidebar->CISTI Search.

Stephen made most of the changes, I'm mainly in marketing.

Anyway, you will also see there's now a pseudo-tabbed interface (just done with graphic links).
I added IngentaConnect to the list of restricted e-Library resources and the Entrez search to Other Search.  Please let us know if there are other licensed resources or search engines you would like to see linked.

Previously:
2005-03-04 updated CISTI sidebar for Firefox
2005-02-12 experimental CISTI sidebar for Firefox

UPDATE 2005-Dec-22: Visit CISTI Lab for the latest sidebar.

IngentaConnect tools to integrate with Google Scholar and Firefox

Google Scholar Highlighter

If you use Google Scholar, this bookmarklet will highlight the citations in your search results which have full text on IngentaConnect. Run your search and then click on the toolbar link to highlight the IngentaConnect results.

---------

Search IngentaConnect via Google Scholar

Use Google Scholar to search IngentaConnect. Highlight words on any web page and click the link, or enter words into the pop-up box.  Your search will be executed on Google but the results will be limited to those available on IngentaConnect.

from the IngentaConnect Labs PowerTools page

They have a Firefox search plugin on their main Ingenta Labs page.

hacking web content

You know what's interesting, people are all up in arms about this experimental Google autolink thing.
But rewriting page content, as long as you control the rewrite, is a big part of the "live where your users are" web integration idea.

dchud is experimenting with using a rewriting plugin called greasemonkey, very cool stuff.

Firefox extensions for BIMPE and SUDOC

BiblioAcid reports on Firefox extensions for two French services: Extensions en mois de 2.

BIMPE = Base d'Information Mutualiste sur les Périodiques Electroniques
SUDOC = Système universitaire de documentation

Firefox overview

ref:blog:spot Firefox Training: Browser Information and Library Applications

updated CISTI sidebar for Firefox

We have updated the CISTI sidebar.  Stephen fixed the problem with the link highlighting.  I made some changes to the search section.

You can do the full sidebar install from Stephen's Firefox extensions page.

I will note that the sidebar is just a regular HTML page, so you can view it and use it like a regular page if you want.  (The difference is that when used as a sidebar, it opens new links and searches in the main browser window.)

Another alternative is to install it as a bookmark that will open automatically in the sidebar.

Previously:
2005-02-12 experimental CISTI sidebar for Firefox

UPDATE 2005-Dec-22:  Visit CISTI Lab for the latest sidebar.

RedLightGreen Firefox search plugin

redlightgreen.com/firefox.html

via ResourceShelf

more on Firefox sidebars

Incidentally, aside from the fancy extension installer method, there are two other bookmark methods to make pages load in the sidebar.

You can go into Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks... (or just pull down the bookmark menu) then pick the one you want and right-click, select Properties, then check the box that says Load this bookmark in the sidebar, click OK.

If you want to programmatically add a bookmark from a page that will open in the sidebar, use e.g.

<a href="javascript:window.sidebar.addPanel('Sidebar Name','URL','');">install sidebar</a>

The user will get an "Add Bookmark" popup window, and whenever they click on that bookmark, it will open in the sidebar.

Info based on Mozilla Sidebar.

experimental CISTI sidebar for Firefox

A sidebar is basically just a regular web page that Firefox will load in a strip along the left-hand side of the main page.  CISTI provides a lot of services, but they are scattered in various different places.  This sidebar provides some quick access to various searches and links in one place.  Once I put together the sidebar page, Steve Anthony packaged it up properly for Firefox.  When you have it installed, you can open it from menu View->Sidebar->CISTI Search, or by hitting ALT-c (on both Windows and Mac).  There are some known bugs - in particular the links in the sidebar don't show up as highlighted. 

Get the sidebar ("Experimental CISTI Research Sidebar") from Steve's Firefox tech page.

As I mentioned, the content is just a regular web page, so you will see an updated version whenever changes are made.

Feel free to provide any feedback or suggestions.

UPDATE 2005-Dec-22: Get the latest sidebar from CISTI Lab.

extending Firefox

I have to type this again, because TypePad lets me wipe out my text by accidentally navigating to another page.  Anyway...

Firefox can be extended in multiple ways.
One of the easiest is the search box in the upper right-hand corner.
You can just click on the default Google G and it will pull down a list of the other installed plugins, as well as a link to add more.  I added Webster for dictionary searching (they already have Dictionary.com but I don't like it as much).

You can also of course write bookmarklets in JavaScript (which really in my head I still think of as LiveScript instead of this meaningless marketing name that has nothing to do with Java programming).

As well, you can add extensions, and create toolbars and sidebars.

And last but not least, you can make quick searches.

Everyone seems to be hot for toolbars, I'm not particularly clear why.
If it's just basic search you want, a search plugin or a quick search makes more sense.

The latest is a Yahoo toolbar.  There is also one for A9.

For some reason, this info doesn't seem to be presented all in one place.

Add search plugins:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html#central-engines
Make search plugins:
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

Quick Searches
The link I have is http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/bookmarks/
unfortunately this is currently down for me
You can get it from the Internet Archive.

You could use this to e.g. set up an ISBN search so that you would just type

isbn 1231231231

into the Firefox address bar.

bookmarklets
http://www.webreference.com/js/column35/

extensions
This tutorial may give you some insight on making Firefox extensions
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2004/12/08/how-to-create-firefox-extensions

Yahoo Y!Q contextual searching

As best I understand, you give it some context (a sentence, a piece of a web page) and it will try to figure out the context and thus related stuff, anyway, there's lots of bits to play with.

Introducing Y!Q beta

including: use it in Yahoo News, an IE toolbar, various ways to add it to Firefox, and even embedding Y!Q on your own site

via Slashdot Yahoo's Y!Q Contextual Search Beta /.

CISTI catalogue Firefox search plugins

A colleague of mine has cooked up a couple unoffical Firefox search plugins for the CISTI catalogue.

Visit Steve Anthony's Universe - Firefox Search Plugins.

UPDATE 2005-Dec-22:  Visit CISTI Lab for the latest search plugins.

Openly Informatics Google Scholar OpenURL Firefox

OpenURL Referrer for Google Scholar (Firefox extension)

OpenURL Referrer is based on Peter Binkley's GoogleScholar OpenURL extension.

Peter Binkley's extension was mentioned previously.  This one from Openly Informatics is easy to customize to use your own resolver.

via Open Access News

Firefox Research Buddy

I get a ton of hits for firefox plugins, so here you go:

Research Buddy

Will help you capture quotes on webpages, with citations.

via Library Stuff