Eric Hellman wrote:
> Rather, the issue is really- why have the ILS vendors not turned
> their OPAC systems into OpenURL resolving systems? I cannot think of
> any good reason. I assumed that this would be an obvious direction
> for the industry to go, but I think my mistake was to assume that the
> industry would "go" anywhere.
I agree with this, and implementing an OpenURL resolver should be exceedingly simple to do by constructing a query from the bibliographic record. One of the problems of OpenURL however, is that it assumes compatible and consistent metadata on both ends of the system.
For example, if the OPAC is to construct an OpenURL from a record for "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, the author part must come from either the 245 $c (tough to parse that out correctly), or the 100/700 fields. The 245 is the form on the item, but the 100 form is the authorized form from the authority file, and there is no guarantee that everyone will use Twain, Mark instead of Clemens, Samuel (or any of his other pseudonyms).
I was involved in a project where Cambridge Scientific Abstracts wanted to create OpenURLs to the records in our catalog where the links to the digital files were, but the forms of our series/serials titles were different from theirs. ISSNs solved that part mostly, but there remained problems in differing interpretations of what the titles of books or articles were, and of course, the names.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Sep 11 2007 - 08:58:32 EDT