moodle-filter-coins
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by Owen Stephens, owen@ostephens.com

moodle-filter-coins is a filter for the Moodle VLE/LMS which looks for COinS (http://ocoins.info). COinS is a way of adding structured data for a reference (e.g. title, author, publication details) in an HTML <span> element. This data can then be used to create a link to online versions of the book or article, if it is available. To make a link, the filter uses a mechanism called 'OpenURL', which is widely used by Universities. To support this, each institution runs a piece of software called a 'link resolver'. The web address of this software has to be set in the filter settings. There are also a few public 'link resolvers' which can be used if there is no locally run software.

The filter has three settings illustrated here

* filter_coins_baseurl. This is the base_url which will be appended to the COinS context object to make the OpenURL. The default value is http://worldcatlibraries.org/registry/gateway, which is a service provided by OCLC. If this is used as the base_url, the OCLC service will try to work out the appropriate base_url for the user based on their IP address. If no resolver can be found, a message will be briefly displayed and then the user will be directed to an appropriate record in WorldCat if possible
* filter_coins_linkicon. It is usual for an OpenURL link to be signified with an icon. The URL for the icon should be entered in this setting
* filter_coins_linkalttext. The alt text for the icon.

The point of the filter is to automatically link from citations to the full-text of articles online, using the OpenURL mechanism. For the filter to work, there needs to be COinS data (i.e. a <span> element containing the relevant data) in the html.

One of the easiest ways to get COinS data into a Moodle page is to drag and drop a citation from the Zotero citation management software (http://www.zotero.org - often run as a Firefox plugin) into the Moodle html editor.

You can view the linked video to see a demonstration 

N.B. for this to work as demonstrated Zotero must be configured to 'Copy as HTML' in the 'Quick Copy' setting, this will include a COinS and formatted reference when you drag and drop into an HTML editor.

This screenshot shows how to set 'Copy as HTML' in Zotero