OpenURLs again

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

I just wanted to post a quick blanket word of thanks to everyone who
provided me feedback on the OpenURL paper I posted here on November
second (http://www.goerwitz.com:31265/papers/ucla/).

Comments ranged from appreciative to outrightly hostile.  Most of the
hostile mail focused on the fact that the paper seemed (in its ini-
tial revisions) to confuse SFX with OpenURLs.  I was also criticized
for my blunt (to some, indelicate) treatment of control issues that
have become a bone of contention between libraries and publishers.  I
was also criticized for inadequate treatment of the "personal link
page" resolver option.  I've tried to work through all these criti-
cisms by revising the paper in various (often significant) ways.

To my mind the big issue with most OpenURL resolution infrastructures
is still that they are fragile and offer little support for one of the
basic mechanisms of scholarly publication: citation.  Current efforts
at remedying this deficiency tend to hinge on third-party cookies,
which most readers here will immediately recognize as a serious prob-
lem with newer browsers, and seem to me to be misguided on a number
of fronts.

I'm also still concerned that libraries are being hyped into a state
of fear at being left behind if they don't move towards OpenURLs -
and this without, at the same time, being told about the implementa-
tion and maintenance challenges they will face and about the gaping
usability holes in current OpenURL resolution infrastructures.

This is not to say that OpenURLs are a dead end.  I think, in fact,
that they hold interesting possibilities.  I just don't have any par-
ticular intellectual or commercial motivation for hiding the hurdles
that must be overcome in order for them to integrate fully into
real-world academic publication scenarios.

If anybody wants to provide more feedback, I'd still like to hear
it.  Remember that my vantage point is that of an academic researcher
and not that of a librarian, per se.  In some sense, I actually speak
for the vast majority of academics - for whom most OpenURL issues are
moot if we can't use them to cite anything.

-- 

Richard Goerwitz                               richard at Goerwitz.COM
tel: 401 438 8978