Stephens, Owen wrote:
> I think what you describe is a similar problem to the (frequent) request
> that we should display 'Full-text' links in A&I databases, rather than
> just an OpenURL link. Although this is possible (by using a Link
> Resolver API to decide if we can link the user (in their current
> context) to the full text of a journal article, and then displaying the
> appropriate link within the user interface), if the user is at a brief
> results screen with 10,20,etc hits on it, then there tends to be a
> significant delay in the display.
>
This is, frankly, becuase most of our software is AWFUL. This is not a
computationally intensive task. We can all afford the hardware neccesary
to support this task without a significant delay, provided by the proper
software. The problem is that the software we have is inefficient, slow,
bad.
> Is this an inevitable consequence of working with distributed systems?
> Is it a matter of just improving the response times on the systems we
> are working with? Or do we need to consolidate our systems as much as
> possible to avoid this 'lag'?
>
I don't think it's an inevitable consequence of working with distributed
systems. Our software just needs to be written to support use cases that
assume this kind of integration, and our vendors are currently letting
us down. I am absolutely convinced that this kind of distributed
environment is the right architecture to be moving towards, for reasons
that would take another essay to explain, and I trust most of you have
seen already.
It's not rocket science. But library software is currently, literally,
years behind the state of the art. And I don't even mean 'cutting edge',
I mean years behind standard good software practices.
Jonathan
> The article describes 4 possible approaches, one of which involves
> grabbing the metadata for local indexing - this would probably be the
> way to stop this 'lag' for respository data (although how much do we
> want to replicate this metadata across many sites?)
>
> Owen
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Tue Sep 11 2007 - 11:38:56 EDT