Proxied URL's and DOI's in Generated Citations

I couldn’t find a mention of this on the listserv, and I thought it worth bringing up to the community.

We’ve been getting reports from faculty that they are seeing citations come through on student papers that have DOI’s or URL’s in them with the proxy information included in the URL/DOI.  This is not correct citation format according to any of the citation styles, because the link will only work for people from our campus, which is contrary to the point of citing sources (making it easy for people to know where you got your info from.)

While it is also not necessarily correct to include the DOI’s or URL’s at all (depending on the style), at least a URL that gives guidance to the reader is helpful, and most citation styles are flexible about that.

In my investigation into this problem, I discovered these citations were coming from the automatically generated “cite your sources” features on several major database providers’ interfaces, when these providers are accessed via the proxy, which we only use for off-campus traffic.  Among the providers: EBSCO, Proquest, JStor, Sage.  Data Planet, too, which is smaller (obviously).  There are likely to be others I did not uncover, since we are a somewhat smaller instutition.  JStor has addressed the issue by choosing to use the URL instead of the DOI, and for some reason, that’s working ok.  We do not recommend that students use these tools to generate citations, because they nearly always contain some kind of formatting, punctuation, or style errors, however we don’t exactly have control over what students do.  We ask faculty to remind them of this, too, but (surprisingly) we also don’t control the faculty.  ;-)  We do provide a more reliable tool (NoodleTools) that does handle citation management, but not everyone seems to like it or knows we have it despite our best efforts to inform them.

I’ve also learned that this insertion of the proxy information in a DOI or URL can be stopped by a directive.  It’s called Option MetaEZProxy Rewriting.  The option wraps the stanza of the particular database, and is global if there’s no paired “Option NoMetaEZProxy Rewriting” statement at the end, so make sure you have that part, too.

The problem is that this directive needs a hook - a particular tag in the HTML of the database provider’s interface.  So… it’s a two-part solution… and we might not know if a database provider’s HTML contains that tag where it needs to be, in the citation generator’s HTML.

Due to the need for vendor involvement and the wide-spread nature of this problem (it was replicated by other institutions), it seems like an issue that needs to be addressed by OCLC, and not for each individual library to address, stanza by stanza, provider by provider.  We “could” check each provider’s website for the needed tag with developer tools, but that seems like a lot of work to be done by individuals – and if it’s not there, then what?  That seems beyond the scope of my work, and the boundaries of my time.  And I’m not sure how much of a fight this is worth, considering that most of those citations are not completely correct anyway.

I brought this problem to OCLC support, and they did give me enough information (after a second message) so that I feel I could confidently use the Option in my configuration file, but even at the level of Tier 2 support, they did not address my firm assertion that this is a problem that needs to be handled  by OCLC and the vendors, not by individual librarians tilting at windmills.  So I am not sure how interested they are in pursuing a solution.

Perhaps commentary on the list will be the measure of whether we need this addressed?

Melissa Platkowski
SYSTEMS LIBRARIAN
..........................................................................
UW-Green Bay Libraries, Cofrin Library CL305G
UW-Green Bay, 2420 Nicolet Drive
Green Bay, WI 54311

www.uwgb.edu/libraries
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