A student emailed me today asking for a refresher in how to narrow down a ProQuest search so that it only retrieves NYTimes articles.
Rather than writing him back with a message that specified, "look for this menu", now "type this in", now "select this", I decided to once and for all figure out a good, local persistent URL script for ProQuest. I had previously been able to script a URL down to the journal level, but it didn't go through our EZProxy server, and thus it didn't work off campus. I didn't want to send the student an URL like that.
I will say that you cannot underestimate my persistence when it comes to playing with URLs. Some might call it a sickness.
Anyway, I finally figured out that I could take essentially any current ProQuest journal page or article-level results list and precede it with our EZProxy URL, making it functional. Our EZProxy server is:
http://alias.libraries.psu.edu/eresources/proxy/login?url=
Here's the end product for the NYTimes search. (I'm embedding the URL because the blog entry editor kept cutting off part of it for some reason, but if you right click on it and copy the link location, you can get the entire thing.)
Wouldn't it be cool if we had a locally-based tool (like this one) that could automatically do this for us?
--Ellysa, documenting this so that she never has to search for how to do it again!
Thank you for posting this - I've been wondering how to do exactly this to send links to our research associates! And I agree, a tool like the one you link to would be very useful.
You should see the link I first had for E-Journals list based on subject (ex: Statistics).
I eventually trimmed it down but it started at 663 characters!?!?!