Owen, I might have missed it in this message -- my eyes are starting glaze over at this point in the thread, but can you describe how the input of these resources would work?
What I'm basically asking is -- what would the professor need to do to add a new: citation for a 70 year old book; journal on PubMed; URL to CiteSeer? How does their input make it into your database? -Ross. On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:04 AM, O.Stephens <[email protected]> wrote: >>True. How, from the OpenURL, are you going to know that the rft is meant >>to represent a website? > I guess that was part of my question. But no one has suggested defining a new > metadata profile for websites (which I probably would avoid tbh). DC doesn't > seem to offer a nice way of doing this (that is saying 'this is a website'), > although there are perhaps some bits and pieces (format, type) that could be > used to give some indication (but I suspect not unambiguously) > >>But I still think what you want is simply a purl server. What makes you >>think you want OpenURL in the first place? But I still don't really >>understand what you're trying to do: "deliver consistency of approach >>across all our references" -- so are you using OpenURL for it's more >>"conventional" use too, but you want to tack on a purl-like >>functionality to the same software that's doing something more like a >>conventional link resolver? I don't completely understand your use case. > > I wouldn't use OpenURL just to get a persistent URL - I'd almost certainly > look at PURL for this. But, I want something slightly different. I want our > course authors to be able to use whatever URL they know for a resource, but > still try to ensure that the link works persistently over time. I don't think > it is reasonable for a user to have to know a 'special' URL for a resource - > and this approach means establishing a PURL for all resources used in our > teaching material whether or not it moves in the future - which is an > overhead it would be nice to avoid. > > You can hit delete now if you aren't interested, but ... > > ... perhaps if I just say a little more about the project I'm working on it > may clarify... > > The project I'm working on is concerned with referencing and citation. We are > looking at how references appear in teaching material (esp. online) and how > they can be reused by students in their personal environment (in essays, > later study, or something else). The references that appear can be to > anything - books, chapters, journals, articles, etc. Increasingly of course > there are references to web-based materials. > > For print material, references generally describe the resource and nothing > more, but for digital material references are expected not only to describe > the resource, but also state a route of access to the resource. This tends to > be a bad idea when (for example) referencing e-journals, as we know the > problems that surround this - many different routes of access to the same > item. OpenURLs work well in this situation and seem to me like a sensible > (and perhaps the only viable) solution. So we can say that for > journals/articles it is sensible to ignore any URL supplied as part of the > reference, and to form an OpenURL instead. If there is a DOI in the reference > (which is increasingly common) then that can be used to form a URL using DOI > resolution, but it makes more sense to me to hand this off to another > application rather than bake this into the reference - and OpenURL resolvers > are reasonably set to do this. > > If we look at a website it is pretty difficult to reference it without > including the URL - it seems to be the only good way of describing what you > are actually talking about (how many people think of websites by 'title', > 'author' and 'publisher'?). For me, this leads to an immediate confusion > between the description of the resource and the route of access to it. So, to > differentiate I'm starting to think of the http URI in a reference like this > as a URI, but not necessarily a URL. We then need some mechanism to check, > given a URI, what is the URL. > > Now I could do this with a script - just pass the URI to a script that checks > what URL to use against a list and redirects the user if necessary. On this > point Jonathan said "if the usefulness of your technique does NOT count on > being inter-operable with existing link resolver infrastructure... PERSONALLY > I would be using OpenURL, I don't think it's worth it" - but it struck me > that if we were passing a URI to a script, why not pass it in an OpenURL? I > could see a number of advantages to this in the local context: > > Consistency - references to websites get treated the same as references to > journal articles - this means a single approach on the course side, with > flexibility > Usage stats - we could collect these whatever, but if we do it via OpenURL we > get this in the same place as the stats about usage of other scholarly > material and could consider driving personalisation services off the data > (like the bX product from Ex Libris) > Appropriate copy problem - for resources we subscribe to with authentication > mechanisms there is (I think) an equivalent to the 'appropriate copy' issue > as with journal articles - we can push a URI to 'Web of Science' to the > correct version of Web of Science via a local authentication method (using > ezproxy for us) > > The problem with the approach (as Nate and Eric mention) is that any approach > that relies on the URI as a identifier (whether using OpenURL or a script) is > going to have problems as the same URI could be used to identify different > resources over time. I think Eric's suggestion of using additional > information to help differentiate is worth looking at, but I suspect that > this is going to cause us problems - although I'd say that it is likely to > cause us much less work than the alternative, which is allocating every > single reference to a web resource used in our course material it's own > persistent URL. > > The use case we are currently looking at is only with our own (authenticated) > learning environment - so these OpenURLs are not going to appear in the wild, > so to some extent perhaps it doesn't matter what we do - but it still seems > sensible to me to look at what 'good practice' might look like. > > I hope this is clear - I'm still struggling with some of this, and sometimes > it doesn't make complete sense to me, but that's my best stab at explaining > my thinking at the moment. Again, I appreciate the comments. Jonathan said > "But you seem to understand what's up". I wish I did! I guess that I'm > reasonably confident that the approach I'm describing has some chance of > doing the job - whether it is the best approach I'm not so sure about. > > Owen > > > The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt > charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302). >
