Tom Keays wrote:
>
> 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.
>   
Even if OCLC doens't get to it, it would not be that hard to write your 
own "wrapper" that accepts an OpenURL, uses the WorldCat API to search 
WorldCat, and then redirects the user to the 'best match' worldcat.org 
record.  That is for title-level (book and journal) records -- for 
article-level, forget it, as discussed.

The trick will be correctly identifying the 'best match' if the openurl 
does not have an oclcnum/lccn/isbn, but only has author/title/year.  But 
my experiments with doing similar things leads me to be optimistic you 
could get 'good enough' (but definitely not perfect) behavior here with 
an intermediate amount of work.

The 'wrapper' could of course present a list of options when it's not 
sure it can identify a single best match.

Jonathan


>
>   
>> 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
>