On 9/11/07, Stephens, Owen <o.stephens_at_imperial.ac.uk> wrote:
> If we put the monograph issue to one side for a moment. I'm not sure
> that our ILS really has much in the way of work flow for serials. Our
> (i.e. the institution I work for, but I suspect more generally true)
> holdings statements are manually entered, not generated from 'check in'
> of issues. We could simply stop entering these into the ILS and rather
> enter them into the Link Resolver.
>
Ah, but your link resolver most likely doesn't have a terribly
sophisticated mechanism for dealing with missing issues or extra
supplements or the myriad other eccentricities in serials management.
Or, rather, since you've already stated that you use SFX, in fact I
can say for certain that you don't have a terribly sophisticated
mechanism (although it is a terribly complicated mechanism) for
dealing with these issues via 'thresholds'. In essence, we'd be
throwing out a non-machine readable "standard" (if you use MFHD, I
guess) for a totally machine readable, vendor-specific "non-standard"
that you wouldn't be able to easily query or export to other systems
since SFX doesn't expose date thresholds in a machine readable fashion
in its API.
I'm not arguing for or against using the link resolver (as we know it)
as our holdings resolver, but /this/ particular solution seems to
raise as many problems as it solves.
-Ross.
Received on Tue Sep 11 2007 - 10:14:38 EDT