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Linking - Permanent / Persistant / Open: Home

Linking

Linking to University of Manitoba Library eBooks, eJournals or articles can be a challenge.  People most want to link in order to:

  • share an article with a friend or colleague
  • add a link to a textbook or article in Desire2Learn 
  • add URL's to reading lists or course syllabi

Problems with linking.  Most people wanting to share/use a link will locate that article, book or ejournal and then copy and paste the URL into an email or document.  While this may work in some cases it doesn't in the majority of cases.  Problems include:

  • using a pre-proxied URL
  • session specific id information included in the URL does not allow it to be used

What is needed is a permanent link.  This can be called by a variety of different names:

  • permalink
  • persistent URL
  • Open URL
  • permanent link
  • durable URL
  • JumpStart

Proxy Server - the key to all links

In order to access electronic articles, books, journals and databases a the University of Manitoba Libraries (UML) people must go through an authentication process. When they authenticate they do so through a proxy server.  

This system provides a great deal of stability to our library services.

This can also be problematic when copying URL's to share.  

For example

You have found the perfect article to share with your classmates working on a project related to the use of yoga in the relief of stress.

Yoga as an alternative and complementary approach for stress management: a systematic review.
Manoj M Sharma
Journal of evidence-based complementary & alternative medicine, 2014, Vol.19(1), p.59-67

You copy and paste the URL of the article and add it to an email to your classmates.

http://chp.sagepub.com.uml.idm.oclc.org/content/19/1/59.full.pdf

Note that the URL has some proxy information inside of it [.uml.idm.oclc.org]. In most instances this should work but not always.


In order for the URL to work the proxy information has to be stripped out of the URL.  But if you do that then the URL will not go through the UML authentication process.  This would mean that faculty/staff and students of the University of Manitoba trying to use your link would be asked to pay for the article unless they had a personal subscription to the journal.  What you need is the proxy base URL to be added to the front of the URL to prompt the authentication process.

The UML's proxy base URL is:

http://proxycheck.lib.umanitoba.ca/libraries/online/proxy.php?

Back to the example

Edit the URL before you send it to your classmates.

http://chp.sagepub.com.uml.idm.oclc.org/content/19/1/59.full.pdf

Remove the proxy information [.uml.idm.oclc.org] to get the URL.

http://chp.sagepub.com/content/19/1/59.full.pdf

Add the proxy base URL to the front of the edited URL.

http://proxycheck.lib.umanitoba.ca/libraries/online/proxy.php?http://chp.sagepub.com/content/19/1/59.full.pdf

Please note that while the resulting URL appears on two lines here it is actually one line with no space.


Once the proxy information has been removed from the copied URL and the proxy base URL added then most links should work in the UML system. BUT this does not work in all cases.

Click on the tabs above to find the most stable and reliable ways to create links to UML resources.