[Web4lib] Federated search products and Full Text/Peer Review limiting

[Roy Tennant]

On Apr 18, 2006, at 9:52 AM, Dale Askey wrote:

> Besides, if you have a good link resolver, why limit to full text  
> results? Just slap a link resolver button on each result, and that  
> problem is largely solved.

I disagree strongly with this position. Slapping a link resolver  
button on each search result does little to help the user focus on  
only content that is available in full-text. Expecting the user to  
successively click on a link resolver button for each and every  
result, not knowing what they can expect, strikes me as particularly  
user-hostile. Realizing this, places like the University of  
Rochester, CSU San Marcos, and now soon us at the California Digital  
Library, are developing services that will do a lookup to the OpenURL  
resolver _before_ putting the search results up, so we can depict  
whether an item is available in full-text or not (with a link direct  
to the source).

Even better would be to have the ability to limit search results to  
full-text resources, but as has been said here that is still  
difficult and often out of our hands (vendors need to support it). So  
no, the problem is far from solved, at least from the perspective of  
good user service.
Roy