Introduction to Link Resolvers

What is a link resolver?

Jargon words italicised and explained below.

A link resolver is a piece of server software that translates an OpenURL request from source into a URL that will retrieve an item from a specific target.

Jargon

OpenURL

Is a standard way of representing citation-type information as a URL (OpenURL entry on wikipedia) e.g.
http://resolver.example.edu/cgi?genre=book&isbn=0836218310&title=The+Far+Side+Gallery+3

The first part (http://resolver.example.edu/cgi?) is the link resolver's base URL and the rest conforms to the OpenURL standard (version 0.1 in this case, there is also a version 1.0 which is much more sophisticated).

Source

A source has two features it contains citation information (i.e. metadata about a bibliographic item) and it has the ability to create an OpenURL by appending the citation information (in OpenURL form) to the base URL of a link resolver.

URL

Uniform Resource Locater, or as we commonly say 'a web address'.

Target

A target is a web server that stores bibliographic items (preferably full text). Good targets allow you to 'deep link' to specific items like journal articles or conference papers. Bad targets only allow you to deep link to the journal's home page or conference proceedings' home page - some targets are so bad they don't even allow that level of linking (Westlaw springs to mind).

OK, So What's a Link Resolver do again?

The Link Resolver gets an OpenURL for an item from a source, checks to see which targets we have access to can provide that item then creates a URL that deep links to that item. So effectively if you find a citation for an article in a source you can click on the OpenURL and the link resolver will check all your e-subscriptions and display the article, even if the source is purely an indexing and abstracting database with no full text component.

Sounds Cool, can we get one?

Actually we've had one since 2004 - which you might know as the 'Find It' button. For four years our Link Resolver software has been SFX. We are now transferring to some new software called 360 Link. Fundamentally nothing changes (except we expect the new software to be much more accurate in searching our e-subscriptions).

Is a Link Resolver good for anything else?

I'm glad you asked. It can accept a request from anything that can generate an OpenURL. Apart from our databases Citation Linker can create an OpenURL from the citation details you provide.

EndNote (thanks Nicole) can also pass OpenURL to our Link Resolver, so that clicking on OpenURL for a citation will search our e-subs and display the item. Zotero and other bib/ref tools can also pass OpenURLs to your Link Resolver.

COinS, a way of marking up citations on a web page so that browsers with COinS-enabled plugins can determine the address of the user's link resolver and create an OpenURL for it.

What's really cool about OpenURLs is they bypass broken links caused by deeplinking via a static URL. For example, consider that in Reserve Online we deep link to course readings. What happens when we transfer the subscription to another publisher, or the publisher updates their site, or they are swallowed by another publisher (like Wiley's acquisition of Blackwells journals last year)? The links break, and Document Services staff have to detect the broken links, find new ones, and change the data in Masterfile. If we used OpenURLs instead it wouldn't matter if the links changed - and if we had multiple subscriptions and the prime one didn't work there would be options to try the others.

And lecturers could use it to create persistent links from citations in reading lists in Blackboard directly to the item. I even created a simple OpenURL creation tool build an OpenURL from a citation on JustUs, which is currently using SFX but I will change to 360 Link soon. In any case 360 Link has a function on its 'more information' screen that will show you the relevant OpenURL for the item you requested.


Let me know if this was useful to you, or if it was too simple or too complex.

Deep Linking to a section of a Youtube Video

Here's a clever little trick to pass on to students and staff who want to show a section of a YouTube video without streaming the entire thing.

Just append the to URL #t=XmYs where X is how many minutes into the video and Y is how many seconds. These values are displayed at the bottom right of the YouTube video player's toolbar if you want to get exact timings.

For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vahx4rAd0N0#t=1m5s

Starts the clip at the 1 minute 5 second mark (actually it starts about 2 seconds earlier in practice). Note in the screen shot that the red line that tracks the progress of the stream doesn't start from the beginning of the video but from your nominated start point.

Saves you the embarrassment of a slow download and irrelevant lead material.

More from the YouTube blog

Cloud Computing

Had a chance to see Kent Adams' (Director IT&R) dry run of his presentation on cloud computing on Wednesday.

Read the Wikipedia entry on cloud computing

It's also referred to as SaaS (Software as a Service), I'm sure it used to be called Application Service Provision (ASP) and before that 'thin client computing' (and even before that mainframe/dumb terminal) but I'm showing my age.

Basically a few players (notably Microsoft and Google) are offering to host services (from email to the Office suite) at prices significantly less than we can provide them for and arguably with a lot more utility. They do this by the sheer economies of scale and a massively distributed network of datacentres/servers. If ITR did move to that model of service provision they would remove themselves from the Sisyphean cycle of hardware and network upgrades, backup and maintenance tasks, the impossibility of meeting increasing user expectations, and a significant user support burden.

Potential downsides include:

• our internet connection becomes crucial in IT service delivery
• that the price today may not be the price tomorrow (Kent quoted Scott McNealy's take "the first heroin fix is free")
• the loss of control particularly over security and privacy
  

The pluses include:

• tapping into a the resources of these giants (Kent was clearly impressed that Google had 350 software engineers IN AUSTRALIA ALONE - so am I)
• proven reliability - can you remember Google being down?
• having access the constant improvements and additional products that are developed on behalf of all customers
• not having to deal with the I: drive, students having gigabytes of storage they can access the same way from anywhere
  

I wrote an issues paper (in response to our I: drive woes) about this much earlier in the year for Heather and Kent and came across this quote from Kari Barlow, Assistant Vice President, University Technology Office, Arizona State University along the lines of ‘Internet services are no longer a cottage industry, not every institution has to build their own from scratch anymore’. ASU have partnered with Google to provide their students with email accounts.

Kent noted that we already are using this model for some services, SpendVision and Serials Solutions are examples.

Kent wasn't presenting it as a fait accompli but it was certainly worthy of consideration. Very cool to see our IT people take the possibilities seriously.

Bought the T-Shirt? See the movie. A 6 minute intro to cloud computing - clear and simple:

Drowning in the Possibilities

I've been prepping for the Professional Development Day (Library 2.0) in Townsville in November and for the Library Planning Days (Rethinking the Virtual Library) the week after and all the reading is making my head feel like a glass of dirty water - I'm just waiting for the sediment to settle.

If I was a tag cloud the big words would be: usability, information architecture, EBL, and user-centric design.

The CMS project rumbles along in the background and the ninjas are currently working on removing references to pages on the old site. There are still publishing issues which are proving difficult to track down. Remember that my monthly reports are on the Intranet as are all the managers' reports and the management committee minutes.

What I've Been Reading

Google Reaches Settlement with Publishers on Google Book Search

"Three years ago, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers filed a class action lawsuit against Google Book Search.

Today we're delighted to announce that we've settled that lawsuit and will be working closely with these industry partners to bring even more of the world's books online. Together we'll accomplish far more than any of us could have individually, to the enduring benefit of authors, publishers, researchers and readers alike.

It will take some time for this agreement to be approved and finalized by the Court. For now, here's a peek at the changes we hope you'll soon see."

Of course there is no indication what this means for the theworld outside United States borders. Nor do I see how the plaintiffs can make an agreement on behalf of publishers and authors who are not domiciled or citizens of the US.

What if Google did go broke? Where would all that scanned data go? The answer is Hathi.

Jarvis, Jeff. Let's junk the myths and celebrate what we've got. The Guardian, September 29, 2008.

"It never fails. I'll be talking with a group about the amazing opportunities of the internet age and inevitably someone will pipe up and say, 'Yes, but there are inaccuracies on the internet.' And: 'There are no standards there.' ...There the conversation stalls....Once and for all, I'd like to respond to these fears and complaints."

Online scientific repository hits milestone

"Reinforcing its place in the scientific community, the arXiv repository at Cornell University Library reached a new milestone in October 2008: Half a million e-print postings -- research articles published online -- now reside in arXiv, which is free and available to the public."
http://arxiv.org/

Bibliographic Software Wars? EndNote vs Zotero/Thomson Reuters vs George Mason University Proprietary data formats in an OpenSource world

Nature reports on the $10 million lawsuit Thomson Reuters (makers of Endnote) have filed against George Mason University (GMU), the birthplace of Zotero (the Firefox plugin that "allows researchers to share their digital information, iTunes style, whether it is in the form of ciations, documents or web pages.

The article discusses the case and the wider implication it has - what if OpenOffice can no longer save or open documents stored in Microsoft's proprietary format?

The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2008

This 2008 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study is based on quantitative data from a spring 2008 survey of 27,317 freshmen and seniors at 90 four-year institutions and eight two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 75 students at four institutions; and analysis of qualitative data from 5,877 written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2008 study also includes a special focus on student participation in social networking sites.

Released in time for the Educause meeting, I'm very interested to hear what Heather has to report back - hopefully we'll get a taster at the Professional Development Day.

Express printer solves problem of out-of-print textbooks
Kate Elder passed this one on - but what an eminently cool idea. Books printed at point of need, no overruns being pulped by the pallet load. No global shipments of books by freight, reducing the publishing industries carbon footprint.

No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century
PDF free, print version available for a fee.

How should we be rethinking the research library in a swiftly changing information landscape?

In February 2008, CLIR convened 25 leading librarians, publishers, faculty members, and information technology specialists to consider this question. Participants discussed the challenges and opportunities that libraries are likely to face in the next five to ten years, and how changes in scholarly communication will affect the future library. Essays by eight of the participants—Paul Courant, Andrew Dillon, Rick Luce, Stephen Nichols, Daphnée Rentfrow, Abby Smith, Kate Wittenberg, and Lee Zia—were circulated to participants in advance and provided background for the conversation. This report contains these background essays as well as a summary of the meeting.

Google: back then, in SFX statistics now, and in federated searching in the future

Ghost of Google's past

First some fun: Google in celebrating its 10th birthday has released its oldest available index (January 2001) http://www.google.com/search2001.html - of course there's a ton of broken links, but the there are alternative links to the content through the Internet Archive.

I did the obligatory vanity search and found the first thing I ever marked up in html (using VI back when it was really ugly). The I tried "twin towers" 911 and got some vacation apartments and one eerily prescient entry from Google Directories:

Business Contingency - http://www.BusinessContingency.com
Few businesses survive an interruption that lasts for more than 10 days. Two thirds of the businesses in the NYC twin towers did not recover. Will you?

Google in our SFX stats

September was something of a red letter month for Google Scholar. For the first time it became the biggest source of SFX requests, and simultaneously for the first time became the biggest source of SFX requests from X Search (Metalib) after the Expanded Academic Index.

The rise of Google Scholar tells us something about our users, and their desire for a simplified search. We have never 'championed' Google Scholar, although I know some liaison librarians will show it to students. Our only acknowledgement that it exists is a oneliner in a relatively 'deep' page, and, I think, the instructions for accessing SFX in Scholar from off campus are in an externally hosted blog that you can't find using our search engine. In spite of all this it is the most popular route clients have to our esubscription content.

Future of Google Scholar in Federated Searching

Serials Solutions announced last week that Google Scholar was no longer available for federated searching through 360 Link because it's not allowed in the Terms Of Use. SS founder Peter McCracken has blogged the change and its implications that makes for interesting reading. The support site was succinct:

Google's Terms of Use state that any federated search engine, such as 360 Search or WebFeat, is not allowed to display results from Google properties. In order to satisfy Google's terms, Serials Solutions will be terminating any connections to Google content in both 360 Search and WebFeat, effective immediately. If you would still like to include Google in your federated search interface, please send a request to Support to have it added as a "link-only resource" -- meaning that there will still be a link to the Google native search in your interface, but Google results will no longer be included in the federated search results.

For more information about Google's Terms of Use please visit: http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS. The specifics can be found in section 5.3.

Touching base, what I am doing

Apologies for my slackness in writing lately. I am quite literally drowning in the CMS conversion. I'd like to thank the Ninjas and especially Sharon Bryan for their work knocking off the last pointy edges before a 'real' trial publish.

One thing I think all the ninjas agree on is that we really need to do a review of our site. Because the site has had bits tacked on in an 'as needs' basis we are finding lots of content that works on its own but not as a coordinated part of the library site. There is massive duplication, particularly of contact information. There also a lot of broken internal links as things like the new book lists have been moved but older pages links to them have slipped through the cracks - and to add to the embarrassment those broken links seem to have been on display for literally years.

Again due to the way the site has evolved over time there is little consistency of 'voice' or format (every form looks different).

I think the two big areas for us to focus on post launch are:

1. A review (with a lot of observational user studies) and a redesign with a view to making the site user-centric based on what we learn from the review
2. A commitment to quality assurance, making the existing content meet standards for accessibility, usability, voice, granularity, consistency, currency, relevance; and building mechanisms (both automated and organisational) to ensure new content meets those standards.

We also have a massive link checking job ahead of us in the subject guides, and I think it's time we started thinking about how we approach resource discovery in our subject disciplines.

I also expect the results of the Client Survey to feed into the areas identified as most important to our clients.

A little factoid I calculated is that 100 of our 6000+ pages generate 92% of our hits - perhaps our long tail is a little too long?

I'm also doing the preliminary design of our 360 Search/Link implementation, helping out with the Library Planning Day committee, and organising the impending Horizon upgrade (3rd of October). If I die I like dark red roses and donations to Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontieres.

The Virtual Library - where to next?

I was going to post about SirsiDynix releasing their Enterprise V1.0 product. I've read the media release and perused the web site at http://www.sirsidynix.com/Solutions/Products/portalsearch.php and I'm still not sure I see anything to get overly excited about. Enterprise is a layer that sits on top of the OPAC (in our case HIP) which provides a few bells & whistles, like faceted results analysis, profiles for specific user groups, some fuzzy searching logic, and a little web2ish content integration (cover images, for example).

It might be attractive to a library with a number of discrete collections, or a consortium, but it seems tied to physical collections and increasingly our collection development revolves around the virtual (ie electronic/digital).

I feel like we can probably stick with our current ILMS for two years before we'd enter a review phase about what we do next. Horizon is now a dead end, if stable, product (after the 7.4.1 upgrade in September). It will continue to be the chief management tool of our physical collections from acquisition to circulation at least until that review.

I think we need to step back and think about how all our resources can best be delivered to our clients and look for tools that allow us to do that, rather than acquiring systems and then trying to figure out how to make them do what we want.

In the last client survey the one area where we lost ground, admittedly not much, was in the 'virtual library' section. Personally I didn't find this a surprise even though I think the resources we provide are better than we have ever provided before. I believe the rapid acquisition of resources and entry points to those resources (think X Search, LearnJCU, Reserve Online, 30000+ ejournals subs, 300+ I&A/FT databases, numerous guides, VISA, LearningFast, remote access, library policies, rules and regs) has swamped an information architecture firmly rooted in a much less virtual information world.

It is time to seriously look at our approach, both in philosophy and technology. I believe we need a more client-centred and client/context-centred approach. I often ponder why we silo-off library materials and services from the rest of the students learning experience. Are we not a key part of the process that creates the perfect graduate? Why aren't our services seamlessly integrated with teaching materials, at the point where they are most relevant. For example why does a student who has logged into LearnJCU and selected a particular subject have to login again to Reserve Online and then enter the subject code to see the readings for the subject? We already know who they are and what subject they're doing. Why aren't the reading lists embedded in the course materials with links directly to the item's full text? I think we should be asking these questions.