Hi Godmar - to help answer some of your questions about the fields - I can
help address those directly.  Though it would be interesting to hear
experiences from others who are working from APIs to search systems such as
Summon or others.

In regards to the publication date - the Summon API has the "raw date"
(which comes directly from the content provider), but we also provide a
field with a microformat containing the parsed and cleaned date that Summon
has generated.  We advise for you to use our parsed and cleaned date rather
than the raw date.  The URL and URI fields are similar, the URL is the link
that we have generated - the URI is what is provided by the content
provider.  In your case, you appear to be referring to OPAC records, so the
URI is the ToC that came from the 856$u field in your MARC records.  The URL
is a link to the record in the OPAC.

If you need more assistance around the fields that are available via Summon,
I'd be happy to take this conversation off-list.

I think an interesting conversation for the Code4Lib community would be
around a standardized approach for an API that meets both the needs of the
library developer and the product vendor.  I recall a brief chat I had with
Annette about this same topic at a NISO conference in Boston a while back.
For example, we have SRU/W, but that does not provide support for all of the
features that a search engine would need (ie. facets, spelling corrections,
recommendations, etc.).  Maybe a new standard is needed - or maybe extending
an existing one would solve this need?  I'm all ears if you have any ideas.

Andrew


On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:14 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi -
>
> this is a comment/question about a particular discovery system
> (Summon), but perhaps of more general interest. It's not intended as
> flamebait or criticism of the vendor or people associated with it.
>
> When integrating Summon into LibX (which works quite nicely btw,
> gratuitous screenshot is attached to this email) I found myself amazed
> by the multitude of possible fields and combinations returned in the
> resulting records. For instance, some records contains fields 'url'
> (lower case), and/or 'URL' (upper case), and/or 'URI' (upper case).
> Which one to display, and how?  For instance, some records contain an
> OPAC URL in the 'url' field, and a ToC link in the URI field. Why?
>
> Similarly, the date associated with a record can come in a variety of
> formats. Some are single-field (20080901), some are abbreviated
> (200811), some are separated into year, month, date, etc.  Some
> records have a mixture of those.
>
> My question is how do other adopters of Summon, or of emerging
> discovery systems that provide direct access to their records in
> general, deal with the roughness of the records being returned?  Are
> there best practices in how to extract information from them, and in
> how to prioritize relevant and weed out irrelevant or redundant
> information?
>
>  - Godmar
>