Introducing Concepts & Tools
What you’ll find on this page:
Concepts
Access Brokers
a tool, technology, or service designed to facilitate fulfillment of an information seeking request from a consumer.
This is a new concept in the library and publishing community, and not yet well-defined (Tay, 2018). A reasonably official version of it is used by the RA21.org organization, which is focused on changing the way authentication and access to academic literature functions.
Essentially, access brokers stand between a user and a provider of information and much like other sorts of brokers, seeks to connect the two. It is a useful catch-all in which to group the myriad technologies that try to make it easier to connect a system that indexes content with the repositories and systems that hold that content.
Authentication
the action or process of validating, approving, or [sic] authenticating something. (OED, 2019)
Authentication is the key to signaling your affiliation with the University of Idaho. Most publishers recognize the University of Idaho network address, so when you search from on-campus, they automatically give you access according to our subscriptions. However, when you search from off-campus, they may have no way of knowing your affiliation, so they don’t provide access until you authenticate.
Privacy
the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from interference or intrusion. (OED, 2019)
This is a critical concept to consider when using access brokers. Often brokers may function as a tool, provided by an external party whose interests may be based more in understanding your behavior (and thus capturing data about you), rather than simply providing access. There is limited business in simply scanning a page and pointing to a link.
Most of the tools listed here are up-front about what they collect and why - it is very difficult to not gather anything and still have a functional, well-designed tool. But some may not have privacy policies that are compatible with your principles or expectations. Read the fine print! Links are provided to existing policies for each tool listed here.
DOIs
a digital object identifier (or DOI), that provides an actionable, interoperable, persistent link to an information resource (International DOI Foundation, 2019)
DOIs are one of the critical elements connecting the modern academic publishing infrastructure. DOIs provide us with a single string of numbers and characters that uniquely identify a digital resources, such as a journal article. The infrastructure around DOIs allow us to link to them, and to use these links to disambiguate (or differentiate) between two items that seem similar. The DOI Foundation is a system in which organizations who join pledge to maintain the persistence of the link for the foreseeable future. It gives us a reasonably stable system on which to expect that we can continue to locate official versions of digital resources on the web and associate them with legal copies.
Types of Tools
Bookmarklets
A small software application stored as a bookmark in a web browser, which when selected typically allows a user to interact with the currently loaded web page in some way. (OED, 2019)
Once more popular than they are now, bookmarklet’s provide one-click functionality for very simple actions. Since most web browsers have a bookmark function, they provide an easy means to do something useful to a user. Specifically, a bookmarklet uses Javascript - the language that is often used for dynamic actions on websites - to run some sort of activity.
Virtual Private Networks
a network connected via the internet in which encryption is used to provide secure access to a remote computer, thus simulating a private network; abbreviated VPN (OED, 2019)
The key advantage of a VPN is the element of encryption or protection. It allows you to control access to your network activity information, as least from prying eyes. In the case of the UI VPN, it’s primary purpose is a little different. It creates a link between your machine and the UI network, allowing the myriad systems that expect you to be operating “on-campus” to see you as connected.
Browser Extensions
an extension adds features and functions to a browser application (Mozilla, 2019)
Browser extensions are like applications that are explicitly to enable a browser to do things that it never would have been designed to do originally. One example is the Zotero (Zotero, 2019) extension. It allows a user to capture metadata (e.g. the citation - title, author, date, etc.) about a digital resource or a web page and add it to a reference manager system. Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft are not likely to build that functionality into their browser software (not to mention for the benefit of Zotero!), but they did create the ability for a non-profit foundation like the Center for History and New Media (who created Zotero) to create that functionality themselves.