OpenAthens101: A guide for our librarians – Redirector links

Wednesday 29th April 2020

A redirector link is a simple way of setting up a WAYFless link. A WAYFless link knows ‘where’ the use is from so the resource doesn’t need to ask. This makes things easier for your patrons.

What the redirector does is allow you to simply stick the target address of the article or section of the resource on the end of a consistent prefix. The prefix is specific to your organisation. The redirector knows what bits to stick where in the WAYFless link, in order make things happen in the background for that target address.

The prefix will look something like this:

https://go.openathens.net/redirector/yourdomain.net?url=

Since it’s a prefix, there are many situations where you can use it in places that support proxy servers, such as link resolvers. The only caveat is that some resources aren’t compatible with the redirector. However, the good news is that an ever-increasing number of resources are. These are known as ‘redirectable’ when discussing the redirector. It is these resources that are best to use with link resolvers as the user is taken to the specified target page. For a resource to be redirectable it must support WAYFless access and deep linking (sometimes called article level linking). There a a few ways to identify if a resource is compatible, which you can find out here.

We have a redirector link generator to allow you to create your own links. The link generator encodes the specified target URL and adds it to the end of a prefix address specific to your domain. The format allows this kind of link to take the place of a proxy address in portal tools. Such as library catalogues or link resolvers.

Our latest 101 webinar covers redirector links. Please view the recording for free on our YouTube.

For more information, please see the online documentation, Or the intermediate course in our VLE: https://vle.openathens.net 

If you have any other questions please contact support@openathens.net or contact@openathens.net.

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