[Web4lib] PubMed and ILLiad

Walker, David dwalker at calstate.edu
Thu Nov 2 11:26:41 EST 2006


To expand a little on what Ross just said:
 
 
As you probably already know, Ilana, it is theoretically possible to have PubMed send an OpenURL to Illiad by registering your Illiad URL with PubMed's link-out service.
 
The problem is that PubMed sends along little more than the PubMed ID in its OpenURL.  That is, by itself, of little use to your Interlibrary Loan staff, and Illiad doesn't know how to map the PubMed ID to one of its form fields anyway.
 
The real utility of the PubMed ID, as Ross stated, is that you can use it as the identifier in a PubMed "look-up" -- basically you can send the ID back to PubMed and PubMed will give you the full bibliographic citation for that item, in XML.  You can then parse that XML, extract all the needed metadata, like title, author, volume, issue, etc., and then simply redirect the user to your Illiad system with all of that metadata.  
 
Note that Illiad can accept some OpenURL 1.0 elements, including ones not present in the 0.1 standard like rft.pub (publisher), rft.place (place of publication), and rft.date (date of publication), which can be useful for book requests, as well as things like the OCLC number with a bit of trickery.
 
The trick here, then, is to create some kind of intervening script that can actually do the PubMed lookup and redirect the user to Illiad.  You would then register the URL of that script with PubMed, although from your user's perspective it would look and behave like a direct link to Illiad.
 
Personally, I would probably just wait for the link revolver. ;-)
 
--Dave 
 
-------------------
David Walker
Library Web Services Manager
California State University
http://xerxes.calstate.edu

________________________________

From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of Ross Singer
Sent: Wed 11/1/2006 7:50 PM
To: Ilana Kingsley
Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] PubMed and ILLiad



Ilana,

It would be pretty trivial to make a script to accept the PMID, grab
the MeSH and make a 0.1 version OpenURL to feed ILLiad.

I don't know what your library supports, but here's the pubmed lookup
client in our resolver:
http://umlaut.library.gatech.edu/umlaut/browser/umlaut/trunk/app/models/dispatch_services/pmid_lookup_client.rb

It's ruby and wouldn't work exactly for your purposes, but it gives an
idea of how to grab the MeSH record from Pubmed and parse the relevant
information for an OpenURL.

Basically, the URL:
http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?db=pubmed&retmode=xml&rettype=full&id=

is the way to get the XML.

Such a service could theoretically be useful if your future link
resolver doesn't support PubMed lookups, either.

-Ross.

On 11/1/06, Ilana Kingsley <kingsley at arsc.edu> wrote:
> Has anyone successfully been able to configure PubMed to populate an
> ILLiad request form? OCLC told me that the PMID is not OpenURL compliant
> and ILLiad doesn't recognize the PMID.
>
> My library does not have a link resolver (just yet).
>
> TIA
>
> Ilana Kingsley, Web Librarian
> University of Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library
> 310 Tanana Drive,Room 449, Fairbanks, Alaska 997755
> Tel: 907-474-7518
> kingsley at arsc.edu || ffimk at uaf.edu
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
>
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