On Sep 12, 2007, at 4:41 AM, Stephens, Owen wrote:
> Is there any uniformity to how existing commerical link resolvers
> handle
> this? Do they (as with SFX) generally work on a broad brush
> approach or
> do any of them make serious attempts to tackle the issues (excuse the
> pun) of missing issues and extra supplements etc. (and how much detail
> is required in a holdings statement?) Are there any standards either
> inside or outside the library sphere that we should be looking at?
> (Anyone familiar with ONIX for Serials - does any of this cover this
> area?)
Owen,
There are lots of issues associated with, for example, missing issues
and supplements, and a great variation among vendors. For example,
there is a popular vendor that doesn't even try to consider journal
enumerations in their knowledgebase, let alone consider supplements
and missing issues.
Knowledgebase vendors like us are to some extent at the mercy of
content providers to provide accurate holdings statements. A common
problem is that a supplement has no representation online, or perhaps
an ejournal which the provider represents as having fulltext online
has only the abstract of supplements online. Less common is the case
where a supplement (either print or electronic) contains only
abstracts of a conference and the abstract gets indexed as if there
is fulltext somewhere. In this case, the link server has performed
perfectly but there is user disappointment. Content providers often
do not report that the e-Version is missing supplements. When
supplements are present, they often link differently than non-
supplements. We strive to make these links work where ever possible
(I'm sure other vendors do the same) but there are some provider
sites that handle supplement linking poorly- we do the best that we
can. Supplements also tend to have non-standard page and issue
numbering which can lead to a higher incidence of transcription error
in the indexing and citation information chain.
Missing issues can strain the representational ability of
knowledgebases- in ours these are handle using multiple records for
continuous spans, but the more serious difficulty is that sometimes
new issues are not sequentially mounted due to provider production
flows. This can result in an issue being missing one week and found
the next. Provider process quality is not always as good as you might
hope (always seems to be humans in the chain, and dang if they don't
sometimes do stupid things) and sometimes issues get missed.
Standards are designed to help, but it is a mistake to look to
standards to solve your problems, especially the hard ones. A vendor
that relies completely on standards for interoperability is a vendor
who does a lot of blaming other people for not following or
implementing standards. More important in the world of electronic
information is the engineering of the the support process and
infrastructure. Problems in linking of electronic information will
ALWAYS occur, so vendors need to build their systems to efficiently
capture problems, fix the problems, and to implement the fixes. Take
a look at the tools you use that don't work as well as you would
like. Chances are, there will be no way for an end-user to report a
problem. Do you think that's a coincidence?
Eric
Received on Wed Sep 12 2007 - 10:48:36 EDT