Just a thought, but an OpenURL allows you to link to a 'bibliographic'
record without being specific about which version of the bib record you
are linking to. It can allow the creation of a citation, and preserve
identifiers etc.
Using the OpenURL means that the "query ?something?" part of this
becomes a link resolver, which then can provide suitable services -
linking to bookstores, libraries, document delivery, etc.
On a slightly different note, following up from another post, I also
found that our 'Recent Acquistions' list - which contains persistent
links to the bib records in our catalogue - has been spidered by Google
at least occaisionally. However, an interesting issue was that although
the full bib record page from our catalogue is in Google, it still
doesn't work very well. There are several reasons for this I'm sure, but
I noticed that the page metadata was really generic, and this led to a
very poor display in Google - see
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3A
en-US%3Aofficial&hs=EJc&q=site%3Alibrary.rhul.ac.uk+physics&btnG=Search&
meta= for a results set, and note that all the hits are labelled 'Full
view of Record'. What I realised (perhaps belatedly) is that it isn't
only a matter of providing simple, persistent URLs for our records, but
a fuller examination of how to optimise OPAC pages for Web search
engines.
Owen
Owen Stephens
E-Strategy Co-ordinator
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham
Surrey
UK
TW20 0EX
Email: owen.stephens_at_rhul.ac.uk
MSN: owen.stephens_at_rhul.ac.uk
Tel: 01784 443331
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: 24 April 2007 17:08
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Spiderable OPACs
Casey Bisson wrote:
> This is chicken and egg of easily linkable/indexable/finable catalogs.
>
> Citation analysis (of the Page Rank variety) won't work until we get a
> good body of links, and we won't get a good body of links until people
> realize they _can_ and _should_ link to our catalogs.
Somehow it doesn't make sense to me for people to link to our catalogs
-- it makes more sense that there should be a way to link to a
bibliographic record which, in turn, could be used to locate the item in
a library. OK, maybe I need to back up a bit. I'm thinking about
citations -- footnotes, end-notes, bibliographies. Citations aren't
about an individual copy in a single library, they are about the
published material which may exist in many different locations. So I
need to be able to make a link to ... a canonical bibliographic record.
Which has to have an identifier. Or some identifiers. And needs to know
its relationship to other bibliographic records (editions, reprintings).
Then I want my word processor to be able to automagically download and
format that bibliographic record into a citation, keeping the necessary
identifiers and able to reformat the citation according to various sets
of rules. So my document will have hot links to the bib data on the web,
which will be able to query ?something? to find actual copies in
libraries and bookstores. I should also be able to see what else links
to that bib record: other writings, reviews.
Hmmm. It sounds so simple, doesn't it?
kc
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant kcoyle_at_kcoyle.net
http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------
Received on Wed Apr 25 2007 - 02:38:48 EDT