Main | OpenURL status update »
October 6, 2005
OpenURL at WOU
This summer, I started work on an OpenURL resolver for the many electronic subscriptions at the library.
"An open what what?" you may ask. Here's the situation:
The library subscribes to more than 100 electronic databases and journal packages. Some of these are citation only, while others have the full text of the journals and magazines included, while still others have a mixture of both. In previous years, I had worked on establishing the Journal Title List (JTL), which at least let library resource users know that we might have access to their article in some way, shape or form. After checking the JTL, the indivudual user still had to do a lot of work, write down their initial citation, open a new database and then navigate to their desired article in the new database. While this was an improvement over the large printed books that we had previously kept in the reference area, it was still some-what cumbersome. Obviously, we were not the only library facing this situation and, in the case of bigger libraries, the situation was far worse. By 2000, librarians and other technologists were thinking about how to make these disparate sources more accessible and, in 2001, NISO formed a commiteee to come up with some standards for inter communication between the databases, or OpenURL.
By 2003, some commercial vendors were on to the idea, but the products were still a little "buggy", primarily because not all openURL vendors were database vendors and not all of the database vendors had implemented the standards yet. In 2005, there are still some hold-outs, but the majority of database and openURL vendors seem to be working together. This is where I come in. WOU's library materials budget is stretched pretty thin and an OpenURL resolver would be yet another expensive subscription to add to that budget. After talking to my colleagues at other institutions and comparing the pros and cons of working on a resolver myself versus paying for one, it seemed like a challenge worth taking.
After some initially screwey attempts at a resolver, I had a working , beta-version by mid-summer. And, by fall term, I had implemented version 1.0 in our Ebscohost databases. We're in the second week of classes now and and on to version 1.02.
Posted by gabaldoc at October 6, 2005 11:31 AM