http://kevin.godby.org/lt2bib/

Let me know if it works for you or if you run into any problems with it.

Unfortunately, the process is a little tedious. I generally start by searching Google or Google Scholar. Once I find an interesting paper, I’ll click on the link. Oftentimes, this will direct me to a login page for whatever archiving service is holding the article hostage. At this point, I have to look at the journal title and volume number. Then I need to go to the library’s huge list of electronic journals and find the suspect journal in the list. Then I have to log in. Then I have to dig around the archives to find the volume and issue that the article appeared in. Finally, I have to scroll through the list of articles in that issue and then find the “download PDF” link. This process isn’t so bad when you just do it once. But when I found myself going through this process repeatedly, I knew I had to find a better way.

So I wrote a little ISU Journals bookmarklet that may help. To install the bookmarklet, just drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmark toolbar in Firefox.

ISU Journals bookmarklet

To use it, just find an article that appears interesting. Click on the link for that article. This will usually lead you to a login page. Then just click on the “ISU Journals” bookmarklet and it will redirect you to the ISU Library login page. Log in using your ISU student identification number (plus the last two digits that no one else ever uses) and whatever random PIN you set. If the library has access to that electronic journal, you should be able to download the full text of the article now.

Please let me know if this works for you or if you run into snags. It’s my first attempt at a very simple bookmarklet, so I may have failed miserably.

When checking prices of flights on http://www.kayak.com/, for example, I can click on the airport code link and it opens a window that lists all the airports and their codes. However, instead of a text listing, why not have a map pop-up (similar to the calendar popups that they use) which allows the user to select the blip representing their airport? The initial click could zoom the map to a region and then show dots representing the airports. When the mouse touches a dot a tooltip should appear which displays the name of the airport.