University Library Proxy Bookmarklet
Saturday, March 12, 2005 at 09:02PM
If you’re like me, you do research on the web, and you browse around different sites for journals, seeing what’s been published, and what you should read. Our library has online subscriptions for lots of these journals, so I can download the papers, file them, read them, etc. It’s all very nice.
But it’s not always easy to get from the site to actually download the paper. Recently, our university introduced a proxy server as the means to keep track of whether someone attempting to download material under the banner of a University of Melbourne subscription is actually authorised to do so (i. e., is a member of staff or a student). So, if I’m at a page for a journal like this
and I want to download a paper like this
I need to manually edit the address, by sticking “.mate.lib.unimelb.edu.au” at the end of the hostname, before the path. (Between “.org” and “/cgi” here). I am lazy and I don’t like having to type “.mate.lib.unimelb.edu.au” time and again when browsing the journals.
So, I use a little link I made – ’+mate.lib’ – in the bookmarks bar of my browser, and whenever I’m on a site, it takes me directly to the relevant page viewed through proxy site, and I can download at will. The bookmark is a simple bit of javascript:
javascript:void(location.href =
'http://' + location.host
+ '.mate.lib.unimelb.edu.au'
+ location.pathname
+ location.search)
and it works like a charm. One click, and you’re there. Feel free to utilise a version of this yorself if your library uses an ezproxy server like ours.
Update: Don’t use the text I’ve displayed here for your own bookmarklet (it contains linebreaks and won’t be quite the right form for your browser). Just drag this link – +mate.lib – to your bookmarks bar.
Update 2: Thanks to a pointer from Richard Zach, I’ve updated the link to preserve the search component of the URL.
News Archive
2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2005 Redesign – Teaching in Semester 1 – Back to work tomorrow – Work, work, work, work... – Matt and Nick talk Dialetheism – Darren Blogging for Tsunami Relief – Happiness is... – I've been writing – Wikis are fun – Get your kicks on Route 55 – Comments on Weblogs – Please Help Us #1: On Self-Saucing Pudding – University Library Proxy Bookmarklet – Logic Books at print.google.com – Seminars at Otago – Searching in Mac OS X Tiger – We're off in almost a month: I've got to get ready! – Skype – Teaching in Semester 2 – The Flight of the Balloon – Rearranging – Logic Colloquium 2005 and ESSLLI 2005 – On applescript and php, and an archive page – AJL – Loud – Up, up and away – In Århus – Keep up with our travels: the map – Off to Athens... – Legroom – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 1 – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 2 – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 3 – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 4 – Denmark, Oxford, Edinburgh … – … Iona, Glasgow, Oxford. – Reflections on Iona, part 1 – Reflections on Iona, part 2 – Cut elimination generalised – Week 1 – Time flies when... – Survived so far... – About to leave Oxford – 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
This is a news item at consequently.org. There are many others at the archive page. You can add comments at the end.
About
I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.
Start at the home page—a summary of the site. The left column is news, archived on the news archive page. The central column is for photos, archived on the occasional photos page. The right column contains recent items from the writing page, which lists my publications. These are also categorised by topic. You can follow my links at my account on delicious and occasional short snarky remarks at @consequently on twitter.
To subscribe to this site, either read the full feed 
of everything, the feed of news items only , or the feed of writing items only , which is also great for podcasting pdfs automatically.
This site is handcoded: I write text in Textmate, and Webby files things in the right place and uploads them to the server. This page was last modified on 2009-01-07 at 12:23PM.
Thought
Dr J. O. Wisdom … once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philsophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.
— Ernest Gellner Spectacles & Predicaments.