JSTOR and Project Muse

Hi all,
I
would like to use Devon Agent for searches on JSTOR and Project Muse, both of which I access through a university library website. That is, I don’t have my own subscription to JSTOR or PM; rather, I work at the university and in order to access to these databases I click their link on the university library site, then provide my university login information, and then I’m in.

Does anyone have a working plugin for JSTOR and/or Project Muse that would work? I don’t know how to write plugins, and in order to use one I would also need instructions on how to install it.

Many thanks!

Shirley

The most recent forum post I’ve seen referring to a JSTOR plugin was in 2009, and was’nt helpful to the OP.

Can anyone help?

Just created an account for JSTOR and checking whether it’s possible. The final release of DEVONagent 3.0 might include a JSTOR plugin therefore but no promises yet.

Hey everyone! I came across this post while trying to futz with DA’s latest JSTOR plugin to accomplish just about the same thing. What I’ve found so far is that it seems to work so long as your URL proxy appends or prepends something to the base JSTOR URLs and so long as you log in to both your proxy and JSTOR through DA’s browser first.

By “seems to work,” I mean that it pulls and indexes the full-text PDF files rather than what DA was getting with the base plugin (mostly journal descriptions, the few times I tried it), thus making the Digest view at least a little more useful. Your mileage may vary—the things that work, I’m not always sure why they work, so it’s sort of held together by duct tape and prayer.

You can download my current file here: static.daniel.sh/personal/ProxiedJSTOR.zip.

Once you’ve unzipped the .plist file, open it in any plain-text editor—TextEdit will work fine—and go through and change every instance of ```

www.jstor.org.proxy.uchicago.edu

to something fitting your institution. For example, if I wanted to use my New School access, I'd change it to

www.jstor.org.libproxy.newschool.edu

. This should still work if your institution requires you to place something before the URL, as long as what you wind up with is a valid address—something in the form of

foo.bar.edu.jstor.org


Once you've made the changes, drop the file in ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONAgent/Plugins/ and, I think, restart DEVONagent. It should then show up in your search options as "JSTOR by Proxy."

But before using it you have to do two things: first, log into your proxy using DEVONagent's built-in browser, and second, log into JSTOR. So open a browser window [i]within DA[/i] and navigate to the JSTOR page through your proxy. Log into everything, then open a new search window and try it out! With any luck, you'll get something like this: [cl.ly/Kujh](http://cl.ly/Kujh)

You should, however, double-check the log tab to see if everything is showing up as "No content." This sometimes means that there's a problem on JSTOR's end, but sometimes means that you have to double-click one of the "No content" items and load the PDF before JSTOR will figure out that you've accepted their irritating agreement. You should also double-check your search settings to make sure that "Linked Documents" is selected as your scanner and that "PDF & PostScript Documents" is checked under "Files." (At least I think you should—that's the way mine is set up.)

If you have any difficulties, please don't hesitate to send me a message or an e-mail (I'm d-atsign-daniel-dot-sh). I'll also accept e-mails with suggestions as to how to get DA's automagical login function functioning, as I haven't yet been able to pull that off. Working on it, though.

Good luck!
1 Like