I strongly disagree that text-based citation be the last resort. By their very nature, direct links are system-specific. A system control number, taken out of the context of that system, is meaningless unless the user of the record has access to that system and can search the number. URLs are prone to failure for various reasons, as we are all too well aware (without data in the record indicating the nature of what the URL originally pointed to, one would be hard-pressed to figure out what in the world it was).
Regarding the argument that "most textual notes ... are not even seen by users" and that "OPACs almost uniformly default to brief records", I will state that Northwestern's OPAC defaults to the full view, and even in the brief view we include the 580 note and 780/785 linking notes. Kevin M. Randall Head of Serials Cataloging Northwestern University Library 1970 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-2300 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: (847) 491-2939 fax: (847) 491-4345 At 09:33 PM 7/25/2006, Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
Adam: I think this is a good suggestion for moving forward, even though I firmly believe that text-based citation should be the last choice, and only when more direct links are impossible. 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. Lest we forget, at present most textual notes citing related works, no matter how carefully crafted, are not even seen by users, as our OPACS almost uniformly default to brief records when displaying information to users. One benefit of links is the potential to allow linked materials to be clearly identified and displayed differently than notes, in ways that could be better integrated into user displays. Diane
