AMERICANA to support COinS format

We are happy and excited to introduce the latest implementation that comes with the new issue of AMERICANA: COinS (ContextObjects in Spans). COinS is a simple, ad hoc community specification for publishing OpenURL references in HTML, the benefit of which is immediately visible if you are using reference/research software or plugin of any sort, as the articles published in AMERICANA will provide you with all the necessary bibliographical data at once. This OpenURL format is used by libraries all around the world, which will make it a lot faster and easier to send out and process the bibliographical meta data – and to search and refer to the given texts.

For more information on COinS, please visit http://ocoins.info

How to

Let us illustrate how to make use of this new feature. We will use a Firefox extension called Zotero.

Once the extension is installed, you have the opportunity to apply some personal settings (e.g. reference style format, folders, etc.), and you are ready to go and research. Once you arrive at a new article published by AMERICANA you will see an icon appearing in your address bar:

Click on the icon and Zotero will save all COinS data that comes with the article (such as author, title of article, url, date of access). Once saved, you can access and work with the data by clicking on the Zotero icon located in your status bar (or any other location in your browser that you specified when setting your Zotero application):

When activated, the Zotero extension will occupy the lower part of your browser window with all the options ready to be used:

Obviously, the extension will work with all sites that use the OpenURL format, such as libraries, publishers, journals – making it really easy to create and maintain a dynamically growing research database of your own, without having to type any bibliographical information, since Zotero will do it for you. When using the database, you can specify the output format (Chicago, MLA, etc.) of the saved data, so you will not need to do any formatting in your reference list.

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