A suggestion on how to get a prof to enter a url.
I use this bookmarklet to add a URL to Hacker News:
javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)
I'm tempted to suggest an api based on OpenURL, but I fear the 10
emails it would provoke.
On Sep 15, 2009, at 10:56 AM, Ross Singer wrote:
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
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Eric Hellman
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