Technical Documents

This document will help you understand and take advantage of Gale direct linking in discovery services (where available). To find out which Gale databases are indexed by provider and which utilize Gale Direct Linking, see the Gale List of Databases by Discovery Partner or visit www.gale.com/discovery .

 

Gale Direct Linking

To improve the likelihood of getting to the intended document from the library discovery service, Gale offers Direct Linking.  Our analysis shows that the current method of linking using Open URL schema often fails (published statistics show failure rates of up to  30% of the time).   This is not due to Gale, but is a commonly known issue related to the nature of the  Open URL schema.  This change is intended to eliminate that issue with Gale content discovery.  We make available to our library discovery partners  links to Gale content that are durable in nature and rely on a numeric vs a Open URL schema.  An example of before/after links is below to show how the complexity of the link has been reduced and how accuracy is increased.  This change requires that the library discovery service partner adopt and implement this in their systems.        

 

To help illustrate exactly what the benefits of Direct Link  vs. an IOURL request is, see below example.

Article:

Fadgyas-Stanculete, Mihaela, et al. 'The relationship between irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric disorders: from molecular changes to clinical manifestations.' Journal of Molecular Psychiatry 2 (2014): 4. Academic OneFile. Web. 26 June 2015.   
When a search is executed in the library discovery service, the link using Inbound Open URL looks like the following -- which has so much data included that it tends to fail if just one element does not match when it hits the Gale platform.  .  In this case. When it is passed to Gale, the  user gets an error message because there is a mismatch in the issue number sent along with this link.

IOURL:

 

http://find.galegroup.com/openurl/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&req_dat=info:sid/gale:ugnid:gale&res_id=info:sid/gale:AONE&ctx_enc=info:ofi:enc:UTF-8&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.atitle=The+relationship+between+irritable+bowel+syndrome+and+psychiatric+disorders:+from+molecular+changes+&rft.aufirst=Mihaela+&rft.aulast=Fadgyas-Stanculete&rft.issn=20499256&rft.jtitle=Journal+of+Molecular+Psychiatry&rft.spage=4&rft.volume=2

Gale Direct Link:

Using Gale Direct Linking, the Gale Direct link  below goes directly to the document full text using its numeric identifier which is readily recognized when it hits the Gale platform -- increasing accuracy of linking and getting the user to the desired document with minimal clicks!

http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541263049/AONE?sid=EBSCO&u=gale

 

For additional information on Gale and discovery services please visit https://support.gale.com/technical/discovery .