Owen,

rft_id isn't really meant to be a unique identifier (although it can
be in situations like a pmid or doi).  are you looking for it to be?
if so why?

if professor A is pointing to http://www.bbc.co.uk and professor B is
pointing to http://www.bbc.co.uk why do they have to have unique
OpenURLs.

Rosalyn




On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Nate's point is what I was thinking about in this comment in my original
> reply:
> If you don't add DC metadata, which seems like a good idea, you'll
> definitely want to include something that will help you to persist your
> replacement record. For example, a label or description for the link.
>
> I should also point out a solution that could work for some people but not
> you- put rewrite rules in the gateways serving your network. A bit dangerous
> and kludgy, but we've seen kludgier things.
>
> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:24 PM, O.Stephens wrote:
>>
>> Nate has a point here - what if we end up with a commonly used URI
>> pointing at a variety of different things over time, and so is used to
>> indicate different content each time. However the problem with a 'short URL'
>> solution (tr.im, purl etc), or indeed any locally assigned identifier that
>> acts as a key, is that as described in the blog post you need prior
>> knowledge of the short URL/identifier to use it. The only 'identifier' our
>> authors know for a website is it's URL - and it seems contrary for us to ask
>> them to use something else. I'll need to think about Nate's point - is this
>> common or an edge case? Is there any other approach we could take?
>>
>
> Eric Hellman
> President, Gluejar, Inc.
> 41 Watchung Plaza, #132
> Montclair, NJ 07042
> USA
>
> [log in to unmask]
> http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
>