I disagree. Putting URIs that unamiguously identify the referent, and
in some cases provide additional 'hooks' by virtue of additional
identifiers (local bibID, OCLCnum, LCCN, etc) is a VERY useful thing to
do to me. Whether or not they resolve to an end-user appropriate web
page or not.
If you want to use rft_id to instead be an end-user appropriate access
URL (which may or may not be a suitable unambiguous persistent
identifier), I guess it depends on how many of the actually existing
in-the-wild link resolvers will, in what contexts, treat an http URI as
an end-user appropriate access URL. If a lot of the in-the-wild link
resolvers will, that may be a practically useful thing to do. Thus me
asking if the one you had knowledge of did or didn't.
I'm 99% sure that SFX will not, in any context, treat an rft_id as an
appropriate end-user access URL.
Certainly providing an appropriate end-user access URL _is_ a useful
thing to do. So is providing an unambiguous persistent identifier. Both
are quite useful things to do, they're just different things, shame that
OpenURL kinda implies that you can use the same data element for both.
OpenURL's not alone there though, DC does the same thing.
Jonathan
Eric Hellman wrote:
If you have a URL that can be used for a resource that you are
describing in metadata, resolvers can do a better job providing
services to users if it is put in the openurl. The only place to put
it is rft_id. So let's not let one resolver's incapacity to prevent
other resolvers from providing better services.
If you want to make an OpenURL for a web page, its url is in almost
all cases the best unambiguous identifier you could possibly think of.
Putting dead http uri's in rft_id is not really a very useful thing to
do.
On Sep 14, 2009, at 1:45 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
Eric Hellman wrote:
http://catalog.library.jhu.edu/bib/NUM identifies a catalog record-
I mean what else would you use to id the catalog record. unless
you've implemented the http-range 303 redirect recommendation in
your catalog (http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/), it shouldn't be
construed as identifying the thing it describes, except as a
private id, and you should use another field for that.
Of course. But how is a link resolver supposed to know that, when
all it has is rft_id=http://catalog.library.jhu.edu/bib/NUM ??
I suggest that this is a kind of ambiguity in OpenURL, that many of
us are using rft_id to, in some contexts, simply provide an
unambiguous identifier, and in other cases, provide an end-user
access URL (which may not be a good unambiguous identifier at
all!). With no way for the link resolver to tell which was intended.
So I don't think it's a good idea to do this. I think the community
should choose one, and based on the language of the OpenURL spec,
rft_id is meant to be an unambiguous identifier, not an end-user
access URL.
So ideally another way would be provided to send something intended
as an end-user access URL in an OpenURL.
But OpenURL is pretty much a dead spec that is never going to be
developed further in any practical way. So, really, I recommend
avoiding OpenURL for some non-library standard web standards
whenever you can. But sometimes you can't, and OpenURL really is the
best tool for the job. I use it all the time. And it constantly
frustrates me with it's lack of flexibility and clarity, leading to
people using it in ambiguous ways.
Jonathan
Eric Hellman
President, Gluejar, Inc.
41 Watchung Plaza, #132
Montclair, NJ 07042
USA
e...@hellman.net
http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
