Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
It mystifies me why there seems to be so much resistance to the idea of providing direct links to either the related item or information about the item without requiring the user to take extra steps to "look up" the information about the related item (which is what we do when we insist on textual citations). In a world where article references are linked via OpenURL and the MARC record includes more and more opportunities to encode such links, I'm missing the reasons for the reluctance.
An interesting footnote in the history of ideas. For instance, at ALA 1998 in Washington, I tried to advocate this idea, specifically for multiparts: http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/allegro/formate/reusep.htm And even earlier, in the pre-conference list of Toronto 1997, I posted a 3-part contribution on the topic of linking: http://www.allegro-c.de/formate/reusep/catalink.htm This was all received with benevolence. But also with no results. The problem is the deep-rooted idea of the bibliographic record as a rock-solid unit that can stand firmly on its own feet and needs no support from other records. And indeed, the exchange of records gets a whole lot trickier once you embellish records with links to other records which you may or may not own in your system! This, more than anything, explains the reluctance. They're just afraid they (or their vendors) cannot handle the stuff, and of course OCLC would have to do something in the first place. OCLC, by the way, funded the REUSE study mentioned above, any mention of which can no longer be found on their website. Regards, B. Eversberg
