Science Library Pad

link resolver issues studied by UKSG

The UK Serials Group report Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain (May 21, 2007) covers the components of the OpenURL resolving equation - OpenURLs, resolvers, Knowledge Bases, and a critical component: the data provided by publishers.

In a perfect world, automated and entirely correct data would flow from publishers directly into our resolver knowledge bases.  It is not a perfect world.

The report discusses some of the major issues and proposes some solutions as well as areas for further research.

One of the main things I get from it is that everyone involved needs to understand how resolvers work, and how correct data benefits everyone in the "serials supply chain," from publisher to end user.

via LiveSerials blog
with more info in LiveSerials blog posting Framework for Improving Link Resolver Systems

PLoS ONE launches with document meta layers and linking

I think if anyone can figure out how to do annotation well, that will be a killer app, but so far there is no "YouTube for annotations".

Most of the PLoS content is not very accessible/interesting to me, but I did explore Concentration of the Most-Cited Papers in the Scientific Literature: Analysis of Journal Ecosystems. PLoS supports both annotations and discussions.

As well, many (but not all) of the reference have a "find this article online" link. As far as I can tell, it parses the link up into a format it can pass to PubMed or Google Scholar. So for example

Garfield E. (2006) The history and meaning of the impact factor. JAMA 295: 90–93.

has a link

http://www.plosone.org/article/findArticle.action?author=Garfield&title=The history and meaning of the impact factor.

presumably if you want to hack, err, "mashup" PLoS findArticle, you just have to pass it an appropriate author= and title=

When you click the above link, you get yet another PLoS page, which says

The article may exist at:

* PubMed/NCBI
* Google Scholar

which seems like a rather click-heavy way to get to a result set.

The links it constructs are

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Garfield%5Bauthor%5D+AND+The history and meaning of the impact factor.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&safe=off&q=author%3AGarfield+%22The history and meaning of the impact factor.%22

Is it just me or are we maybe not leveraging the full richness of article metadata here?
As far as I can tell, PLoS ONE knows nothing about OpenURLs, or resolvers.

via Open Access News - PLoS ONE launches

two perspectives on interoperability and what it could enable

In case you're wondering, I finally managed to clear my Bloglines backlog, including the published literature, D-Lib and Ariadne.  I found two very different, but complementary views on how service standards and standard interfaces can enable an enhanced scholarly workflow or other advanced combinations of services.

In Serving Services in Web 2.0 (Ariadne issue 47, April 2006, ISSN  1361-3200), Theo van Veen of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands explores and explains some fundamental concepts of Service-Oriented Architecture and standard service interfaces.

In this article I discuss the ingredients that enable users to benefit from a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by combining services according to their preferences. ... This concept is an extrapolation of the use of OpenURL and goes beyond linking to an appropriate copy. Publishing and formalising these service descriptions lowers the barrier for users wishing to build their own knowledge base, makes it fun to integrate services and will contribute to the standardisation of existing non-standard services.

In An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains (D-Lib, October 2006, Volume 12 Number 10, ISSN 1082-9873), Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze et al explore how you can build services using an interoperable network of digital object repositories

This article describes an interoperability fabric among a wide variety of heterogeneous repositories holding managed collections of scholarly digital objects. These digital objects are considered units of scholarly communication, and scholarly communication is seen as a global, cross-repository workflow. The proposed interoperability fabric includes a shared data model to represent digital objects, a common format to serialize those objects into network-transportable surrogates, three core repository interfaces that support surrogates (obtain, harvest, put) and some shared infrastructure. This article also describes an experiment implementing an overlay journal in which this interoperability fabric was tested across four different repository architectures (aDORe, arXiv, DSpace, Fedora).

Atlantic Scholarly Information Network blog and info

I don't know much about the Canadian ASIN (Atlantic Scholarly Information Network) project, but they do have a blog with some info.  (Prepare for acronym fever.)

The CAUL [Council of Atlantic University Libraries] have begun implementing the ASIN Portal which includes single-signon authenticated access to the combined licensed and public resources of the CAUL libraries. The [Atlantic Provinces Library Association (APLA) conference] session will cover the individual components of the Portal including federated/broadcast searching, OpenURL resolution, Relais document delivery and Subject Rooms which are all maintained by the Sirsi’s Rooms context management system.

Via Stephen on CISTI Architecture internal bliki.

Google Scholar + your library's resolver = Schooglibrary

I'm sure this will be all over the liblogosphere, but I think it merits mention as it is fantabulous:

Now, ANY library or institution that has the proper link resolving software can hook into Google Scholar and provide direct links to articles found via a GS search. This is a service the library community has been asking for since Google Scholar launched last November. You can find all of the details here. Google also is releasing a help page for the service.

Google Scholar has also increased the number of journals and books it can provide direct links to. Previously, only articles with a DOI's (digital object identifiers) or PMID's (PubMed unique identifier) would work. Now, after collaborating with many link resolver vendors Google is able to gain access and crawl local holding information for the journals that a specific institution or library holds to help provide direct links to articles. In other words, DOI's are not required.

Google Scholar developer Anurag Acharya told ResourceShelf that most libraries should be able to turn on a configuration option in their link resolver and be up and running in a short amount of time. He also told us that all participating libraries will appear as a selectable affiliation via a search on the preferences page. This will allow Google Scholar users to take advantage of these direct links when they are using the database off-campus or not connected a computer on the campus network.

Finally, Acharya alerted us to a change on Google Scholar results pages. Now, if the searcher's preferred library has access to an article found via Google Scholar, a direct link to the material will receive better placement on the search results page. The link will now found directly next to the title of the article or book and in some cases made even more visible by appearing in a different color than other parts of the result entry.

From Resource Shelf - Be It Resolved that Google Scholar is Now Open to More Libraries.
Of course, all of us who have hacked overlays for Google Scholar will now have to review our code.

OpenURL presentation and blog

Cindi Trainor not only did a presentation on OpenURL at CIL2005
but she also has an entire blog about OpenURL: openurl.blogspot.com

via scitech library question

reSearcher library tools - more info

I've mentioned the reSearcher suite of tools before.

via Do-It-Yourself Ask GODOT: Open Source Link Resolver I discover that SFU has a development wiki that supports the reSearcher projects.

list of public OpenURL resolvers

We're actually having a challenging time trying to get Exlibris to understand what we want to do with our resolver.  What we want to do, is anyone can use it to resolve, but they're obviously going to land on resources they may not have access to if they're not from NRC or from our larger partner community.

Anyway, before I forget it, there is a bunch of work in this area, including a wiki list of public resolvers

Table of Public OpenURL Resolvers

This of course ties in with this whole Google Scholar resolver prefs situation.

Google Scholar prefs

scholar.google.com/scholar_preferences

This is very cool.
Google Scholar will link up with your resolver, if you are on the select list.
Presumably the select list may eventually become "every library with a resolver".

from scitech library question

UPDATE:

U of Virginia’s Jim Campbell backed this up with a link to a blurb on the CrossRef site saying CrossRef and Google are working together on this:

Google would like to use the DOI as the primary means to link to an article so CrossRef and Google will be working on this as well as a template for common terms and conditions for use of publishers full text content.

via Bibliotheke

the schedule is for results from CrossRef Search to be delivered from Google Scholar starting in April

via Open Access News

 

OpenURL 2003 seminar

I found an interesting seminar with presentations: OpenURL Day 2003 from the Center for Scholarly Communication at Long Island University.

For example

14:45	Marianne Parkhill, vice-president marketing, Endeavor Information Systems
	OpenURL and what it means for the digital library [PowerPoint]

leveraging OpenURL and "discovery" to autolink to everything

This is so hot:

Appropriate Resolvers, Dynamically: Adding rel and title attributes to OpenURLs.  A Prototype.

from dchud's work log

Previously:
HTML-based service autodiscovery

deep linking into your OPAC

Lorcan Dempsey is as usual thinking deeply, this time about deep linking.

OCLC is in the prototyping stage of creating a registry of OpenURL resolvers. On top of this registry, we will create an OpenURL gateway service that will accept an OpenURL request, identify the requestor, and redirect them to one or more OpenURL resolvers that are available to them.

Integral to this OpenURL registry will be an OPAC registry/gateway service to transform OpenURL requests into local OPAC deep-links. For example, an OpenURL request sent to the OpenURL registry's gateway for an ISBN will include a deep-link into the local library's OPAC for the item.

from Linking to libraries.

reSearcher - open source academic library tools

reSearcher is an award-winning integrated suite of open source tools for locating and managing electronic information resources, designed for use by students and researchers in academic libraries. The four main modules of reSearcher are:

• GODOT, a full-text link resolver and interlibrary holdings locator and requesting system
• CUFTS, a full-text link resolver, knowledgebase, and electronic collection management tool
• Citation Manager, a tool for capturing, managing and exporting bibliographic data in a wide range of formats
• dbWiz, a cross-database search tool

Openly Informatics Google Scholar OpenURL Firefox

OpenURL Referrer for Google Scholar (Firefox extension)

OpenURL Referrer is based on Peter Binkley's GoogleScholar OpenURL extension.

Peter Binkley's extension was mentioned previously.  This one from Openly Informatics is easy to customize to use your own resolver.

via Open Access News

UMinnesota resolver-blog link

Now this starts to get very interesting.
What if one of the options generated by your resolver is "post this OpenURL / citation into my blog"?

That's exactly what they have done at the University of Minnesota (this turns out to be quite old news actually, from May 2004).
Read Post Database Citations In Your Blog.

Via Lorcan Dempsey's weblog posting More on infrastructure.

blog about sfx, refworks in OCUL

Library Web Chic finds an interesting blog

I found a neat new blog this week entitled "Making Links". According to the about page, "Making Links is a website created in September 2004 to share information and to support librarians within the OCUL consortium who are adapting their library services to two technologies new to OCUL: SFX and Refworks".

(OCUL is the Ontario Council of University Libraries.)

Google Scholar OpenURL Firefox extension

Google Scholar OpenURLs - Firefox Extension

from oss4lib-discuss

IL2004 - Monday - 14:47 OLinks

Originally posted 2004-11-16.

Marlene Porter
Medical College of Ohio

implemented 2002

local holdings listed first (presumably this is ScienceServer, “EJC” - Electronic Journal Center)

Free, distributed under GNU Public License

local customization - under development

Enhancements are suggested by OHIOLINK

strengths
- free
- local control of development
- local and consortial titles loaded
- ties in seamlessly to authentication
- redirects non-article citations

weaknesses
- need the staff to support
- doesn’t do title lists

They have Web of Science with OLinks.
and various other services

Options
- link to full text when available
- dsplay local holdings and link to home or consortia catalog
- citation
- google search
- ILL
- etc.

can also search catalog

lots of usage statistics
- incoming
- outgoing
- most frequently requested titles with no electronic full text

http://olinks.ohiolink.edu/

IL2004 - Monday - 14:20 OpenURL: Choices, choices

Originally posted 2004-11-16.

Athena Hoeppner
Marlene Porter

The October 2004 Computers in Libraries has a useful article
Helping You Buy: OpenURL Link Resolvers
by Christine L. Ferguson and Jill E. Grogg
(fulltext is not available online)

list of OpenURL resolvers
Athena presents a survey she did of vendors
- they contacted 20 vendors, got 13 responses

biggest remote vendors (remotely hosted)

LinkSource -157 installations
Journal Linker - 150
LinkSolver - 130

local
sfx 670
webbridge 168

total base (combined remote + local)
SFX
LinkSource
LinkFinderPlus

many different pricing structures

OHIOLINK - OLinks is free to OHIOLINK and ?is open source?
Godot ? open source from Canadians ??

UPDATED from web search: GODOT

Sirsi has largest knowledge base, but most in same ballpark (80,000 - 70,000)

OLinks only has titles for participating libraries

GetCopy - says full text providers should allow their services to be queried directly for access rights - check vendor on the fly - no knowledge base

GetCopy maybe uses SOAP?

resolvers can also offer many other extended services e.g. link to online bookstores, patent databases etc.

extended services - interest is increasingly in specifically targetted services - use Shibboleth auth info to show targetted information based on user roles

some reports may offer features similar to electronic journals management

IL2004 - Monday - 13:15 Federated Searching and OpenURL (Part I)

Originally posted 2004-11-16.

“An Introduction to Federated Searching and OpenURL”
Frank Cervone
Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL, USA

[Oh I see THEY have Internet (the presenters)]

federated search - search multiple resources (in background) - provide unifed results list

using OpenURL to link to full text in results list

“the vast majority of OpenURL is done using URL rather than DOI”

presents OpenURL as a way to link source database to target database, e.g. from FirstSearch get OpenURL, your resolver turns that into a linkt to EBSCO

this is as opposed to having direct, internal links (typically to internal resources) in the source database

OpenURL
- redirect through resolver
- resolver interprets data which may be
-- DOI
-- a URL encoded with metadata about the resource
- locates appropriate copies

they implemented SFX, it took them about 3 months
but Northwestern had “serial solutions” data
another place didn’t have that data and it took them 2 years to key it all in

they prioritized their results based on availability, comprehensiveness, whether you actually get it consistently when you click on it, quality of PDF etc.

you then have on-going maintenance of your OpenURL database, but most of this should be automated

“as nice as OpenURL is, it is just a stop on the destination to federated searching”

what is federated searching
- metasearch
-- uses metadata to make decisions
- megasearch
-- uses full text to make decisions
-- e.g. dogpile, alltheweb

federated search engine - ezproxy (remote auth and acces) - world of elec tronic resources

once you have located the info (using federated searching) then use OpenURL to locate appropriate copy

people overwhelmingly choose a single, common, unified interface

they are building federated search for undergrads
live search
shows # of hits
can look at individual result sets

users (e.g. faculty) can select which databases they want
they have set a limit of 8 databases that you can federate at a time

also have “my resource list” - user’’s last search, favourite resources (databases)
as well “my e-journals list” which shows the journals covered by the fave resources

OpenURL steps...
- linking to providers - get them to enable OpenURL, interfaces etc.

federated search major issues
- time to cnfigure databases and resources
- dedup results / relevance ranking
- defining searchable collections

They are using ExLibris for federated searching.

“The Long and Winding Road: Evolving E-Journal Management and Discovery Tools”
Cindi Trainor
Director, Information Technology
The Libraries of the Claremont Colleges

they use lots of Serials Solutions stuff
they also got RefWorks

doesn’t seem to actually be anything about federated search and OpenURL

she just gave us her ezproxy access