Export to RefWorks from Evergreen

At my place of work, we signed up for a site-wide license to RefWorks last fall. We’ve also recently moved to Evergreen for our new ILS (press release). Naturally, there was a request from library staff to add a function in Evergreen to export citations from the OPAC directly into RefWorks.

I was happy to discover that Evergreen makes this relatively easy, thanks to SuperCat (part of Evergreen’s backend). With SuperCat and a record id, a record can be fetched in many different formats, simply by changing the URL (e.g., OPAC view vs marcxml vs MODS). This comes in handy when dealing with RefWorks.

Sending citations to RefWorks can be done with a callback. Essentially, you add a link to RefWorks’ import function page and send it your credentials, as well as a callback URL that RefWorks uses to grab the record from your ILS…in a RefWorks-supported format. The problem is that RefWorks doesn’t accept MODS, MARC, or even MARCXML. They say they accept MARC, but it’s actually what I call “MARC text” (it is described very well by Bill Dueber).

So with Evergreen, all that was needed to support Export-to-RefWorks was:

1. a new transform for SuperCat that converts MARC to “MARC text”;
2. a new SuperCat feed for the new format;
3. a button in the OPAC that links to RefWorks and provides the credentials and callback URL.

Voilà! The new “marctxt” SuperCat feed (which uses the new transform) provides the callback URL for RefWorks to grab the record and import it. I submitted a patch yesterday to address #1 and #2, above. A patch to auto-generate the info needed for #3 is forthcoming (and pretty straightforward). So Evergreen should soon support Export-to-RefWorks right out of the box.

(“Fine. Now take it off.” [SuperCat] photo created by “Allergic to Work” on Flikr, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license).