In the UK, we have been investigating the possibilty, problems, etc.
of a UK national default SFX resolver as part of the ITAM project
(http://www.mimas.ac.uk/metadata/ITAM).
We have been trialling a national default SFX resolver within a
service environment, with the help of a few UK institutions. (We
have also been trialling hosting a couple of institutional SFX
resolvers.) This project is funded by JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk)
until the end of July 2003. Ex Libris provided the SFX licence at an
advantageous price for the trial - they are interested in feedback
from the project.
The national default resolver was initially set up to provide links just
to free services that would be available to all end users. But,
following feedback from the guinea pig institutions, subscription
services that are available within most UK Universities are now
included. These are services like ISI Web of Science, Elsevier
ScienceDirect and Ingenta. It was felt that the benefit to the many
who have access to these services made them worth including
even though some end-users may get inappropriate links.
I would ceratinly agree that a national resolver would be of benefit
for small institutions, even if the targets included were not specific
to their subscriptions. They are unlikely to be able to afford to buy
their own SFX resolver. There is also quite a large workload
overhead in setting up and maintaining an insitution resolver, that
may be beyond the capability of an organisation with minimal
staffing.
Another example of a default OpenURL resolver is provided by the
zetoc service. zetoc provides access to the British Library's
Electonic Table of Contents of journal articles and conference
papers to UK higher and further education. From an article record
in zetoc is a link to 'more information' - most users want to get to
the full text. Where an institution has an OpenURL resolver, zetoc
links to that resolver. But when there is no OpenURL resolver
recorded with zetoc (the majority of UK institutions), zetoc provides
a default link to MDL LitLink, MIMAS having a licence to provide a
LitLink service to UK academia. LitLink provides links to services
known to hold a copy of the required article such as Elsevier
ScienceDirect, but has no knowledge of the user's subscriptions.
zetoc tells its users 'there is no guarantee of success but worth a
try'. From access logs it is apparent that this link is well used, and
zetoc has had no complaints about providing this link (except when
it has been turned off!)
So we have seen some successful use of default national
OpenURL resolvers. In fact, I think that users are tolerant of some
dud links, provided they achieve a general level of success in
getting to the full text of articles.
Best wishes,
Ann
Date sent: Mon, 26 May 2003 10:55:16 -0400
Send reply to: An informal open list set up by the UK Serials
Group <[log in to unmask]>
From: "Hamaker, Chuck"
<[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [LIS-E-JOURNALS]
SFX-local/regional/national?
To: [log in to unmask]
ON May 19th Shirley Ainsworth [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
wrote:Re:
SFX "if an article is available from 4 or 5 different sources, which
is often the case, and this should be represented in the national
database, this is also extremely frustrating for the users- how are
they to know which one(s) is the right one for them?" ... "While the
idea of a national database sounds wonderful, I reckon that at some
point in the chain we need information about each institution's
subscriptions, so the results can filtered through that."
Response from
Chuck Hamaker
I think most libraries (large academics are a small minority in the
overall scheme of numbers of libraries) may never be able to
support
localized implementations though they need them as much if not
more
than large acacdemics. Smaller libraries need to be even more
efficient than large ones in use of their e-resources and ultimately
in linking them.
I believe open url resolution is going to become as obvious a
necessity for navigating through and across databases as online
catalogs were for libraries in the 80's.
For libraries in consortial systems with shared electronic resources
it should be fairly simple to implement open url linking for all the
consortial "same resource" databases. I.e. provide cross database
sourcing with open url compliant databases. I think that's how
Colorado's GoldRush system began.
The "unique" resources might take a bit more effort, but for many
libraries, this could be a relatively small number of titles or
databases. More than half the e-titles I have rights to are from
central consortia, ie. I share those rights with probably several
hundred libraries. -public, academic, etc.
With some resolver systems --the local library doesn't need its own
server, nor its own personnel to set up and maintain. I think this
suggests that doing it for one or doing it for hundreds or thousands
might be less burdensome than it sounds --especially if there are
significant shared or same resources held by participants. No
resolver
is a hundred percent anyway.
How many libraries have Proquest and Ebscohost, or IAC or some
combination. Should each library that does haveto configure, pay
for,
maintain a local resolver system for users to cross seamlessly
across
these resources to identify and retrieve full text? Why?
For the "individual" unique stuff,perhaps we need local resolver
configurations-though given products coming on the market right
now,
I'm not even sure about that.
If a country or group of institutions have the same rights to
multiple full text resources, then centralized resolver systems make
sense. The easier we make it for people to find the stuff, the more
likely we are to retain funding and increase usabilty.
Chuck
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Ann Apps. Senior Analyst - Research & Development, MIMAS,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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NISO's OpenURL: the standard that puts thinking back in linking
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