Yes, I know about this, and I think this is great ... for Evergreen  
users. My concern is how we get it out there to the majority of  
libraries who aren't on an OS platform and/or cannot make changes to  
their UI. As I think your post demonstrates, what we need is to get  
through to the system vendors and get them to implement this kind of  
linking. I intend to chat up vendors in the exhibits at ALA to find  
out what this means to them. I suspect they are reluctant to rely on a  
system or feature that may not be stable or persistent (a reasonable  
reluctance when you have thousands of installations), so then the  
question becomes: how can this be made to work?

kc

Quoting Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]>:

> (Apologies in advance if this looks like crap, I hate trying to  
> reply in context in GroupWise)
>
>>>> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Quoting Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]>:
>>
>>
>>> What are the reasons that this sort of integration not more
>>> widespread? Are they technical or institutional? What can be done by
>>> producers of open access content to make this work better and
>>> easier? Are "unified" approaches being touted by vendors delivering
>>> something really different?
>>
>> I've been struggling with this around the Open Library digital texts:
>> how can we make them available to libraries through their catalogs?
>
> You're aware of the recent addition of the OpenLibrary Read API,  
> which is meant to simplify exactly this problem, right?
>
> The official announcement was at  
> http://blog.openlibrary.org/2011/06/03/announcing-a-new-read-api/ ;  
> http://ur1.ca/4g5bd describes how I integrated it into Evergreen  
> with a few hours' effort (mostly helping to debug the new service);  
> the official documentation is at  
> http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/read and I augment those docs in  
> the latter half of the presentation I gave last week (available in  
> plain text, html, and epub formats at  
> http://bzr.coffeecode.net/2011_olita/ ).
>
>> When I look at the install documentation for Umlaut [1](I was actually
>> hoping to find a "technical requirements" list), it's obvious that it
>> takes developer chops. We're not going to find that in a small,
>> medium, or often even a large public library. It seems to me that this
>> kind of feature will not be widely available until it is included in
>> ILS software, since that's what most libraries have.
>
> The OpenLibrary digital editions enhancement approach I took in  
> Evergreen was about 100 lines of JavaScript (around here:  
> http://ur1.ca/4g5cm ), most of which could probably be cloned (under  
> the GPL v2 or later) to any other library system from which you can  
> scrape ISBNs or other identifiers (LCCN, OCLC, or OpenLibrary IDs).
>
> Note that the Evergreen-OpenLibrary integration hasn't been merged  
> yet, but the branch is there and will hopefully make its way into  
> core Evergreen soon.
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet