What is the customized In-house Link?

The In-house Link option is a free service that provides a link from a CAS or STN record of interest to your local (chosen) web service. The following products provide this service through the ChemPort Connection:

• STN^® on the Web^SM
• STN Express^® with Discover!^TM
• STN Easy^®
• STN Easy^® for Intranets^SM
• SciFinder^®
• CA on CD^TM
• CASelects^TM on the Web^SM

The In-house Link allows your patrons to take full advantage of the document services your local web service provides. Examples of services you provide may include:

• Your library's home page and the services it provides
• Automated card catalog or OPAC look-up
• Immediate access to electronic articles available in-house at your site or at publisher web sites
• Forwarding of document copy orders to your supplier of choice
• Access to interlibrary loan services

How does the In-house Link work?

After the initial setup (described below), users of SciFinder, SciFinder Scholar, STN, and other CAS services will see a link to your local web service on the ChemPort Connection page.

When a user clicks the link, the user's browser is pointed to your local web service (or another web service of your choice). The link contains descriptive information about the document of interest, including complete bibliographic information. From that point forward the pages the user sees, and the services delivered, are provided from your local web service.

Setup and Operation

Setup of the In-house Link is performed by your organization's SciFinder, SciFinder Scholar, or STN Site Administrator. If you do not know who your administrator is, you can contact CAS Customer Service.

The administrator must contact CAS Customer Service to request additional information and obtain access to a web site for maintaining the In-house Link Option (Some administrators delegate the technical work of site administration to their web master or web technology expert). The administrator is responsible for supplying and maintaining the information required to activate the In-house Link. This information includes:

• Base URL for your local (chosen) web service. This URL can be any you choose. You may establish a special URL for this link, or use an existing library service URL. You may use a third-party URL. The URL you provide may contain your own static parameters, as long as the parameter names do not conflict with the ChemPort parameters (see below). If you want ChemPort to provide links for both patents and journals (and other non-patent documents) you can provide different URLs for each. If you do not have a web server application, you can provide a simple HTML page. Your server will ignore the parameters added by ChemPort.
  
  
  • Base URL Example:

    http://library.your-location.com/cgi-bin/yourown.cgi?

  • Base URL Example (simple HTML page):

    http://library.your-location.com/libraryrequest.html

• Text for the ChemPort link to your local web service. You provide CAS with a short name. The name you provide will appear on the ChemPort connection page.
  
  
  • Examples: "ABC Library", "Link to ABC Library", "Order document copies from ABC Library"
  
  
• Select format for descriptive link information to be included with the base URL. Depending on your local web service capabilities, the choices are the OpenURL format (recommended) or the CAS-specific format.

If you wish to set up the linking service from CA on CD^TM, other CD products, or CAS Selects^TM on the Web^SM, contact CAS Customer Service.