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On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > The trick here is that traditional library metadata practices make it _very > hard_ to tell if a _specific volume/issue_ is held by a given library. And > those are the most common use cases for OpenURL. > Yep. That's true even for individual library's with link resolvers. OCLC is not going to be able to solve that particular issue until the local libraries do. > If you just want to get to the title level (for a journal or a book), you > can easily write your own thing that takes an OpenURL, and either just > redirects straight to worldcat.org on isbn/lccn/oclcnum, or actually does > a WorldCat API lookup to ensure the record exists first and/or looks up on > author/title/etc too. > I was mainly thinking of sources that use COinS. If you have a rarely held book, for instance, then OpenURLs resolved against random institutional endpoints are going to mostly be unproductive. However, a "union" catalog such as OCLC already has the information about libraries in the system that own it. It seems like the more productive path if the goal of a user is simply to locate a copy, where ever it is held. > Umlaut already includes the 'naive' "just link to worldcat.org based on > isbn, oclcnum, or lccn" approach, functionality that was written before the > worldcat api exists. That is, Umlaut takes an incoming OpenURL, and provides > the user with a link to a worldcat record based on isbn, oclcnum, or lccn. > Many institutions have chosen to do this. MPOW, however, represents a counter-example and do not link out to OCLC. Tom