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 <[email protected]>:
(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 <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoting Eric Hellman <[email protected]>:
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
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
