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

[Ross Singer]

If you think they're not going to do that anyway, you are grossly
overestimating your audience.

The truth is that there's a near infinite number of citations available.

Your library has a very finite number of titles/resources.

The more times the user clicks on a link to wind up at your resolver screen
(and there's no fulltext available) the user is going to view that as 'a
failed search'.  Unless the user knows that this citation is absolutely
essential to the task at hand, they will not request it via ILL.

Further, even if you own the item in print, but your link resolver is unable
to tell the user that (say, it's a conference proceeding, a government
document or merely a different edition of a book), this will also be viewed
as a failure.

The more these failures add up, the less confidence the user will have that
'clicking on a link resolver button' will get them anything worthwhile.  The
smaller your collection (or the larger the amount of searchable citations)
will only make this worse.

Honestly, it is /essential/ that we integrate the link resolver better into
results.  Whether that means different icons for different level support,
different text, different menus, whatever.

Constantly sending the users down a long and dark hallway into a room full
of closed doors is not going to inspire a lot of patron confidence in our
services.

-Ross.

On 4/18/06, Karen Harker <Karen.Harker at utsouthwestern.edu> wrote:
>
> However, using such visual cues as the appearance (or non-appearance) of
> the link resolver button/link could only further the reliance on full-text.
> Encouraging this behavior would encourage the students to ignore anything
> that is not easily available, causing them to miss a still rather large
> segment of literature and information.
>
>
>
> Karen R. Harker, MLS
> UT Southwestern Medical Library
> 5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
> Dallas, TX  75390-9049
> 214-648-8946
> http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/library/
>
> >>> Roy Tennant <roy.tennant at ucop.edu> 4/18/2006 1:24 PM >>>
>
> 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
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