[WEB4LIB] link resolver server - purchase or in-house?

[Tim Bucknall BUCKNALL]

I believe that the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) 
probably has one of the more fully featured locally developed link 
resolvers - Journal Finder. We set it up several years ago when SFX was in 
beta and initial quotes sounded as if SFX would cost us 10s of thousands 
of dollars.

Over the years, competition has driven the prices of link resolvers down 
somewhat, so it makes less sense to develop your own. Frankly,  the only 
way UNCG has been able to justify maintaining Journal Finder instead of 
going with a large commercial product is that we've spread the cost of its 
development and support across 25 universities and colleges that now use 
it. It just wouldn't make economic sense to bear that cost on our own.

My perspective as someone who has built their own resolver and run it for 
years is that it is almost certainly not cost effective to run one by 
yourself for yourself, but if you can gather enough partners to achieve 
economies of scale and share the costs, then it might be worth it in some 
instances.

Tim Bucknall
Assistant Director - Jackson Library
Head, Information Technologies and Electronic Resources
336-256-1216
bucknall at uncg.edu



Kwangsoo Han <kwangsoohan at mail.und.nodak.edu> 
Sent by: web4lib at webjunction.org
02/24/2005 12:15 PM
Please respond to
kwangsoohan at mail.und.nodak.edu


To
Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
cc

Subject
[WEB4LIB] link resolver server - purchase or in-house?






This topic might have been discussed before, but I really would like to 
hear your experiences.

These days a few companies offer a link resolver system based on 
'openURL.'
Has anyone set up and managed your own production-level 'link resolver 
server' in your library rather than purchasing?
I remember I have read a magazine article saying that it is easy to do 
that because of the flexibility and easiness of 'openURL', but I wonder 
HOW EASY it would be.

I encountered an open-source openURL resolver called 'OLinks' (
http://olinks.sourceforge.net/). Has anybody have experience with that?

Thanks a lot,

Kwangsoo

************************************************
Kwangsoo Han
Web Services Librarian
Chester Fritz Library, http://www.library.und.edu
University of North Dakota



*********************************************************************
Due to deletion of content types excluded from this list by policy,
this multipart message was reduced to a single part, and from there
to a plain text message.
*********************************************************************





*********************************************************************
Due to deletion of content types excluded from this list by policy,
this multipart message was reduced to a single part, and from there
to a plain text message.
*********************************************************************