Coming soon: LinkSource demo

A common gripe of students, and one that is entirely fair and reasonable is "if I search database A and I find an article that I want to read, but the full-text isn't available, is there any easy way of finding the full-text without looking in databases B, C or D?" Now, hopefully we have an answer to that coming soon. EBSCO, who host a variety of databases that we subscribe to, have a product entitled LinkSource. LinkSource is what is a known as a link resolver. A link resolver is basically the answer to the gripe above. A more technical definition would be: software that takes a scholarly citation formatted as an OpenURL (don't ask, but if you must it's a metadata standard heavily used by libraries to mediate linking from information resources. Happy now?) and gives the user various things they can do with it, such as access full text, make an ILL request, get it from the library stacks, search Google Scholar and so on. The bit that you'll be interested in is "access full-text". As an example, suppose you are searching for material on hedge funds on Business Source Complete and find an article from the "Journal of Investment Compliance" you really want to read. No full-text is from this journal is available on Business Source Complete, but with the addition of LinkSource, you'll see a link that will take you to the the full text of this article (on Emerald, for what it's worth). If I can get it set it up correctly, I'll let you know when it's working