Evolving the Resolving

摘要

In the ubiquitous web era, it seems strange that linking well can be such a problem for libraries. But it is. The same content can be licensed from different vendors, so it's key to get the user from search results to the licensed article. But the solution could be more elegant. The development of the OpenURL specification and resolver was clearly a breakthrough. An OpenURL can indicate all the metadata components of an article such as title, author, volume, issue, date, page number, etc. The resolver software then checks its database of library licensed content and tries to find a match. If it does, then it can provide a link to that article. If it doesn't, the library can configure its resolver service to put up a menu of options such as searching the catalog to see if there is a copy in print.