On Sep 11, 2007, at 4:59 AM, Stephens, Owen wrote:
> Thanks all for the responses.
>
> One of the questions I asked was 'why have we stopped at electronic
> journals?' [when using link resolvers].
>
> Karen specifically tackled the question of 'why not books?', and
> suggested that this was to do with scalability. I don't know enough to
> say if this is an issue or not (although my instinct is that it would
> be). At least some Link Resolvers do deal with e-books, although I
> don't
> know how successfully (anyone with any experience of this?). I'd also
> question at what point scalability becomes an issue - the library I
> have
> recently left had something in the region of 300,000 unique monograph
> titles - would this present a problem to the link resolvers on the
> market?
We run a "monster instance of our link server with 2,000,000 holdings
including 400,000 ebooks. It's noticeably slower than a normal link
server, but still not as slow as many OPACs. The scaleability issues
go away as you get enough RAM to hold the index, but as it's not a
big deal to get a server with 1GB of RAM, 300,000 monographs is
pretty insignificant these days.
>
> Also, if we see e-books going in the same direction as e-journals
> (available via multiple suppliers on the web, only some of which an
> institution will have access to), then the 'appropriate copy' problem
> arises again - and this is what link resolvers were designed to solve
> for journals - will we need a similar solution for books?
Yes!
Eric
Received on Tue Sep 11 2007 - 07:51:23 EDT