There’s a problem with a small number of e-book URLs in our library catalogue (held in MARC records, field 856$u, for some—but not all—e-books from Coutts MyiLibrary). For complex historical reasons, the normal URL, e.g.:
http://www.myilibrary.com?Ref=Athens&id=115106
Has been percent-encoded like this:
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myilibrary.com%3FRef%3DAthens%26id%3D115106%0A
This causes an error (“Invalid Web Address”) when you try to import the details into “My Bookmarks” in the reading lists system:
We’re working to eradicate these unnecessarily-encoded URLs from the catalogue. In the meantime, here’s a temporary fix.
- Import the record into the reading lists system as normal using the bookmarklet.
- Before you click on “Create”, copy the e-book URL from the “Web address” field.
- Go to this website: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/
- Paste the URL you copied into the large box on the screen, and hit “Decode”.
- Copy-and-paste the normal, decoded URL back into the reading lists system.
- Click on “Create” as normal and the e-book will be added to “My Bookmarks”.
Hi Paul – do you know how the URLs entered your catalog with the bad formatting? Did they arrive that way in the MARCs?
They’re my fault. We encoded them ourselves as a very inelegant hack to get around an Athens authentication/redirect problem when we first started adding e-book links to the catalogue. We quickly found a better way of doing it, but there are still c.200 early records with the unnecessary encryption. They didn’t cause a problem until we started using Talis Aspire and EBSCO Discovery Service, and the quality of our MARC records suddenly became more important! We should get them fixed ‘at source’ this week.
That’s great news. If you run in to any troubles or have any requests, let us know.