Hi everyone,

We use Aleph for our back end ILS and WorldCat Local as our discovery layer. We'd previously maintained both the OCLC KB and the SFX KB, but under the principle of not maintaining data in two places we've retired SFX. We started out just shadowing records for e-books and e-journals in Aleph, but are now wondering what it would look like to continue to have those records available in Aleph and find a way to have them link out. The URLs in these (currently shadowed) records go to SFX, and trying to redirect or batch update those looks like a no-go based on the difficulty of matching up the SFX and OCLC KB data. So we'd have to hide those URLs and find another way to get the user from the Aleph search result to the electronic version of that item.

In this scenario we're considering a 'find full text' button in Aleph that sends an OpenURL request through to the OCLC link resolver. It's basically old-skool OpenURL as before KBs existed. Or how OpenURL works from an A&I database.

We think it's possible to do this in Aleph piggybacking on how the SFX requests were constructed and sent, but would like to talk with others who have done this or something similar through Aleph, if there are any. Anyone have any experience with this? Or words of advice?

Jenn

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Jenn Riley
Associate Dean, Digital Initiatives | Vice Doyenne, Initiatives numériques

McGill University Library | Bibliothèque Université McGill
3459 McTavish Street | 3459, rue McTavish
Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 0C9 | Montréal (QC) Canada  H3A 0C9

(514) 398-3642
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