Linking journal databases to the periodical

[George Porter]

Interestingly enough, a similar question was raised on 17 January 2001 on
ELDNET-L, although then it was coming from a database vendor.  Eric Hellman
mentioned SFX in response to Corey Stier's inquiry about linking to local
holdings from A&I databases.  I'd like to expand a bit on the questions of
just what is SFX and what it can do for libraries.  Caltech is a beta test
site for SFX.

SFX is a technology created by Herbert Van de Sompel and described in a
series of articles in _D-Lib Magazine_ in April and October 1999.  
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/van_de_sompel/04van_de_sompel-pt1.html>
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/van_de_sompel/04van_de_sompel-pt2.html>
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october99/van_de_sompel/10van_de_sompel.html>

Non-proprietary processes are needed to reduce the huge amounts of
investment and effort which database vendors have been pouring into
repetitive, stand-alone implementations of this kind.  A couple of different
ways to link to a library's catalog are ISSN and CODEN.  A syntax for doing
this is OpenURL
<http://sfx1.exlibris-usa.com/openurl/openurl.html>.  NISO accepted OpenURL
as a work item in December 2000, the first step toward standards
accreditation. 

OpenURL is a simple way to pass tagged bibliographic information between
services.  For instance, ISI would pass bibliographic data from Web of
Science in such a way that libraries could implement catalog lookup and a
host of other services, as determined by the individual institution.  A
sample OpenURL string would look like:

http://sfxserver.uni.edu/sfxmenu?'genre=article&issn=0095-4403&volume=20&iss
ue=3&spage=22&epage=24&date=1994&part=&title=BULLETIN+OF+THE+AMERICAN+SOCIET
Y+FOR+INFORMATION+SCIENCE&aulast=TENNANT&auinit=R&atitle=THE+TRAINING+HURDLE
+-+TIPS+AND+TECHNIQUES+FOR+INTERNET+TRAINERS')
 
Reading closely, after the specification of a local SFX server
<http://sfxserver.uni.edu/sfxmenu>, the rest is descriptive information of
Roy Tennant's article about tips for Internet trainers around the web
browsing dawn of 1994, published in _Bulletin of the American Society for
Information Science_.  The journal data is actually redundant, with both
ISSN and journal title passed from the source.  Either of these bits of
information, or CODEN, when available, could be used to fuel an OPAC
look-up.  In addition, the
volume/issue/page/author/title information are often sufficient to generate
a fulltext link to a publisher's website.

With SFX technology, though, the librarian is in the driver's seat.  In
addition to journal title look-up or fulltext linking, a library could
choose to offer author searching in the OPAC, cited reference searching in
Web of Science, web searching with keywords from the article title, or
anything else the librarian thinks of offering tomorrow or next year.

The burden on the database vendor, in this example ISI, is to construct
OpenURLs and to build a mechanism for recognizing which users should get
OpenURLs.  One way to do this, proposed by ExLibris, is to build a "cookie
pusher" <http://sfx1.exlibris-usa.com/openurl/cookiepusher.html> to provide
the context to bring each database user the options chosen for them by their
librarian.  The cookie includes the location of the appropriate SFX server
for a given database user.

Even better, the effort put forth by a library to create the tables required
by many vendor's one-off mechanisms would pay dividends by being applicable
to all SFX-enabled databases to which the library subscribes.  TANSTAAFL*,
libraries do have to create the basic control table within SFX, documenting
the titles they to which they have fulltext rights, location of the OPAC,
etc.  In turn, the pattern used to reliably predict an article's URL has to
be documented.  The library chooses where to send  their clientele to
retrieve articles from any particular journal (publisher website, aggregator
database, both), addressing the "appropriate copy problem".

The appropriate copy problem has been discussed many times.  A recent
article by Jill Grogg and Carol Tenopir in _Searcher_ may be a good starting
point if the phrase wasn't immediately clear
<http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/nov00/grogg&tenopir.htm>.

Libraries have to pay a fee to ExLibris to license the technology.  Vendors
can implement OpenURL and CookiePusher for free, and ExLibris will be happy
to help them.  I do not have a financial stake in ExLibris.

George S. Porter
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
Caltech, 1-43
Pasadena, CA  91125-4300
Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681

* There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch