In this series, we wanted to take a few moments to celebrate some great tools that have been developed for and by librarians (and other library pros) to solve a particular problem they’ve encountered in their work.
You can read all about cataloguing tools in the first part of the series. In this part two, we are focusing on tools built to help provide seamless access to information. Library professionals often have to find ways to reduce unnecessary barriers to the information they need, whether this is for staff needing info to connect services together, users seeking full text access to research or a myriad of other use cases where info is hidden, blocked or obfuscated.
This was partly inspired by the sad news that Open Access Button & InstantILL are shutting down and partly by conversations about some great tools that had sprung up in the sector from need, necessity and ingenuity.
Filling the gaps in information access
There are more and more tools emerging that help fill the holes that often appear between vendor platforms and full text access.
OA Helper, developed by Claus Wolf, is a user-friendly tool designed to help researchers, students, and academics access free versions of scholarly articles. In a world where access to research papers is often restricted behind paywalls, OA Helper serves as a handy bridge to open access (OA) resources. There are browser extensions as well as mobile apps for both OS and Android to help users find an open access version where available (and to guide them to their institutional subscription when it’s not).
Full text seeker is a great example of a librarian-developed tool to solve an issue they were facing. In this case, it is a macro-enabled spreadsheet created by Tracy Bruce to help conduct systematic reviews (and reduce interlibrary loans).
You can import a CSV file of a library of articles, and automatically generate a worksheet of pre-populated search strings for Google Scholar, Internet Scholar Archive, and ResearchGate, Useful to help find any PDFs that the automated EndNote and Zotero searches can’t find, and to reduce unnecessary inter-library loan requests. Version 10 is now available at the time of writing, so development is definitely continuing – make sure you check for the latest version.
Perma.cc is a nifty tool developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. It’s designed to prevent link rot by creating permanent, unchangeable snapshots of web pages. When you generate a Perma.cc link, it captures the exact content of a web page at that moment, frozen in time. And at the Innovation Lab, they have also built and shared plenty of other neat tools including H2O Open Casebook (to help law faculty create open textbooks) and WARC-GPT (using AI to explore web archives).
These are just a few of the tools that we’ve encountered that can help get the information needed with as few barriers as possible. And as always we’d love to hear your thoughts and any favourites that we might have missed.