Subject: [CODE4LIB] OpenURL question

From: stuart yeates <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:06:59 +1200

We have an index of place names that we're considering digitising and 
ingesting into our collection (http://www.nzetc.org/). For each place 
name a series of bibliographic references (often including page #) list 
uses of the place name. We want to build a mapping from those 
bibliographic references to the documents:
* some of the doucments are in our electronic collection
* some of the documents are in other peoples' electronic collections
* some of the documents are not online yet, but may soon be

Is OpenURL the right tool for this job? Is there an implementation / 
configuration that people suggest for this?

cheers
stuart
-- 
Stuart Yeates
http://www.nzetc.org/       New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/     Institutional Repository

---

From: Ross Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:04:06 -0400

Stuart,

The short is answer is "probably".

The longer answer is that, yes, OpenURL is currently the best way to
accomplish what you're looking for.  That being said, I think your
audience may make this a little more complicated and the solutions
perhaps more fragile and "hacky".

Since you don't have an /institutional/ target audience (at least,
that's the impression I get), this falls out of the sort of
traditional OpenURL workflow.  Generally, you have some a priori
knowledge of the affiliation of the service user and can point your
OpenURLs at that person's institutional link resolver (so they can get
context services that are appropriate for them).  When you don't have
that, the general answer is to use COinS [1].  However, COinS
themselves have no way to associate a person at a web browser with an
institutional link resolver.

Dan Chudnov wrote a couple years ago about using the OCLC Link
Resolver Registry to handle this [2]:  grab the user's IP address, do
a lookup in the background, and rewrite the COinS to use the person's
institutional link resolver, if there is a match.

The problem is, because it's based on IP, it's quite possible there
will not be a match.

There's also the reality that lots and lots (perhaps the majority) of
people have no access to a link resolver at all - do they just get
left in the dark?  It's also possible that some (much?) of what you'd
be citing would be available in OA archives or Google Book Search or
Open Library.  This would make the case to also run a 'default' link
resolver, such as the Umlaut [3], to find open web things.
Conveniently, the Umlaut is engineered(*) to be able to handle the
OCLC Resolver Registry and merge an external resolver (or resolvers)
into the options.

I fear this doesn't sound terribly encouraging, but good luck,
-Ross.
[1] http://ocoins.info/
[2] http://onebiglibrary.net/story/solving-the-appropriate-resolver-problem
[3] http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Umlaut

* - Umlaut originally had this functionality, but due to a lack of
perceivable need, it's gone a bit to seed.  That being said, it's
designed to do this and shouldn't be too difficult to reintegrate.
On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 10:06 PM, stuart yeates<[email-masked]> wrote:
> ingesting into our collection (http://www.nzetc.org/). For each place name a
> series of bibliographic references (often including page #) list uses of the
> place name. We want to build a mapping from those bibliographic references
> to the documents: