DigitalKoans

CrossRef has made a DOI finding tool publicly available. It’s called Simple-Text Query. You can get the details at Barbara Quint’s article "Linking Up Bibliographies: DOI Harvesting Tool Launched by CrossRef."

What caught my eye in Quint’s article was this: "Users can enter whole bibliographies with citations in almost any bibliographic format and receive back the matching Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for these references to insert into their final bibliographies."

Well not exactly. I cut and pasted just the "9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI" section of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography into Simple-Text Query. Result: error message. I had exceeded the 15,360 character limit. So, suggestion one: put the limit on the Simple-Text Query page.

So them I counted out 15,360 characters of the section and pasted that. Just kidding. I pasted the first six references. Result?

Alexander, Martha Latika, and J. N. Gautam. “Institutional Repositories for Scholarly Communication: Indian Initiatives.” Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community 19, no. 3 (2006): 195-201.
No doi match found.

Allard, Suzie, Thura R. Mack, and Melanie Feltner-Reichert. “The Librarian’s Role in Institutional Repositories: A Content Analysis of the Literature.” Reference Services Review 33, no. 3 (2005): 325-336.
doi:10.1108/00907320510611357
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00907320510611357

Allen, James. “Interdisciplinary Differences in Attitudes towards Deposit in Institutional Repositories.” Manchester Metropolitan University, 2005.
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005180/
Reference not parsed

Allinson, Julie, and Roddy MacLeod. “Building an Information Infrastructure in the UK.” Research Information (October/November 2006).
http://www.researchinformation.info/rioctnov06digital.html
Reference not parsed

Anderson, Greg, Rebecca Lasher, and Vicky Reich. “The Computer Science Technical Report (CS-TR) Project: A Pioneering Digital Library Project Viewed from a Library Perspective.” The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 7, no. 2 (1996): 6-26.
http://epress.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n2/ande7n2.html
Reference not parsed

Andreoni, Antonella, Maria Bruna Baldacci, Stefania Biagioni, Carlo Carlesi, Donatella Castelli, Pasquale Pagano, Carol Peters, and Serena Pisani. “The ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library: Meeting the Requirements of a European Community within an International Federation.” D-Lib Magazine 5 (December 1999).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/peters/12peters.html
Reference not parsed

Hmmm. According to Quint’s article:

I asked Brand if CrossRef could reach open access material. She assured me it could, but it clearly did not give the free and sometimes underdefined material any preference.

Looks like the open access capabilities may need some fine tuning. D-Lib Magazine and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review are not exactly obscure e-journals. Since my references are formatted in the Chicago style by EndNote, I don’t think that the reference format is the issue. In fact, Quint’s article says: "The Simple-Text Query can retrieve DOIs for journal articles, books, and chapters in any reference citation style, although it works best with standard styles."

Conclusion: I play with it some more, but Simple-Text Query may be best for conventional, mainstream journal references.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 9:06 am and is filed under Metadata, Open Access. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.