COinS

moodle-filter-coins
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by Owen Stephens, owen@ostephens.com

moodle-filter-coins is a filter for the Moodle VLE/LMS which looks for COinS (http://ocoins.info). COinS is a way of adding structured data for a reference (e.g. title, author, publication details) in an HTML <span> element. This data can then be used to create a link to online versions of the book or article, if it is available. To make a link, the filter uses a mechanism called 'OpenURL', which is widely used by Universities. To support this, each institution runs a piece of software called a 'link resolver'. The web address of this software has to be set in the filter settings. There are also a few public 'link resolvers' which can be used if there is no locally run software.

The filter has three settings illustrated here

* filter_coins_baseurl. This is the base_url which will be appended to the COinS context object to make the OpenURL. The default value is http://worldcatlibraries.org/registry/gateway, which is a service provided by OCLC. If this is used as the base_url, the OCLC service will try to work out the appropriate base_url for the user based on their IP address. If no resolver can be found, a message will be briefly displayed and then the user will be directed to an appropriate record in WorldCat if possible
* filter_coins_linkicon. It is usual for an OpenURL link to be signified with an icon. The URL for the icon should be entered in this setting
* filter_coins_linkalttext. The alt text for the icon.

The point of the filter is to automatically link from citations to the full-text of articles online, using the OpenURL mechanism. For the filter to work, there needs to be COinS data (i.e. a <span> element containing the relevant data) in the html.

One of the easiest ways to get COinS data into a Moodle page is to drag and drop a citation from the Zotero citation management software (http://www.zotero.org - often run as a Firefox plugin) into the Moodle html editor.

You can view the linked video to see a demonstration using Zotero and the COinS filter in Moodle

N.B. for this to work as demonstrated Zotero must be configured to 'Copy as HTML' in the 'Quick Copy' setting, this will include a COinS and formatted reference when you drag and drop into an HTML editor.

This screenshot shows how to set 'Copy as HTML' in Zotero