OpenAthens101: A guide for our librarians – Redirector links

A Redirector link is a simple way of setting up a WAYFless link. A WAYFless link knows ‘where’ the user is from so the resource doesn’t need to ask. This makes things easier for your patrons.

What the Redirector does is allow you to simply stick the target address of the article or section of the resource on the end of a consistent prefix. The prefix is specific to your organization. The redirector knows what bits to stick where in the WAYFless link, in order to make things happen in the background for that target address.

What will the prefix look like?

The prefix will look something like this:

https://go.openathens.net/redirector/yourdomain.net?url=

Since it’s a prefix, there are many situations where you can use it in places that support proxy servers, such as link resolvers. The only caveat is that some resources aren’t compatible with the redirector. However, the good news is that an ever-increasing number of resources are. These are known as ‘redirectable’ when discussing the redirector. It is these resources that are best to use with link resolvers as the user is taken to the specified target page. For a resource to be redirectable it must support WAYFless access and deep linking (sometimes called article-level linking). There are a few ways to identify if a resource is compatible, which you can find out on our Redirector documentation site.