[WEB4LIB] Re: Re: Betr.: Building a database for e-journals

[Eric Hellman]

At 12:57 PM -0700 10/18/01, Eric Tull wrote:
>I think one of the major questions is whether you can need to 
>develop a separate database of your
>e-journals, or whether you can manage your e-journals through your 
>library catalogue.  We manage
>ours in the catalogue but we don't export them in any way.  I was 
>interested to see how the
>Universite de Montreal manages their e-journals within their library 
>catalogue but then uses pulls
>out alphabetic and subject lists of their e-journals to the web
>(http://www.bib.umontreal.ca/SB/PEL/)

It's a principle of information architecture that every atom of 
information should exist in exactly one place, just as in software 
architecture actions and methods should be componentized and reused.

Object oriented programming advocates binding code to data objects, 
which should then "know" how to do things.

When this philosophy really comes to the library world (and it will), 
we will be talking about telling catalog records to do things and 
about catalog records having methods or actions. Today's catalog 
record is just data. Link-servers just happen to really want to have 
actions bound to data.

So asking whether e-journal management should be done in the catalog 
or in a separate database, is the wrong question in the long run. 
("Whatever works" is the answer for today.) In the long run, the 
question will be "What should an e-journal management object do?" and 
where it does it will not matter to anyone.

Eric
-- 
Eric Hellman
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