Where’s My Link? A Perspective on Why Linking is Not Perfect
A white paper by Diana Bittern
Director, Software Product Management
Ovid Technologies
Institutions continue to invest significant resources to purchase
electronic full text for their patrons. Then, additional investments
and resources are required to purchase and implement link resolution
systems that promise to connect end-user students and researchers
from a bibliographic citation to the full text article in the
cited electronic journal. In essence, much time and money is
spent to fulfill the concept of “one-click access”
to full text. . [read more]
Linking Across the Digital
Divide
A white paper by Diana Bittern
Director, Software Product Management
Ovid Technologies
Open linking has become the accepted standard in the information
industry today. Publishers are providing full text of their
electronic journal and book content, and content aggregators
are linking from their bibliographic databases to full text
content both within and outside their hosted collections. In
short, accessing full text electronically is expected as baseline
functionality by today’s web-savvy users. Most primary
publishers either have their own websites where they offer electronic
versions of their journal and book content, or contract with
vendors like Lippincott Williams & Wilkins or Highwire to
host their society’s website. Others, like Ovid, led the
way to full text linking from bibliographic databases by introducing
aggregated, fully searchable full text collection databases
(Journals@Ovid), then supplemented this service by linking to
remote full text with OpenLinks. Then, along came the vendors
who offered content-agnostic, centralized linking servers and
opened the doors to bi-directional resource linking through
OpenURL. New players and solutions are arriving on the scene
daily. The product offerings are complex, and sweeping new claims
are being circulated that require careful scrutiny regarding
initial setup and ongoing maintenance. This paper attempts to
put the state of linking today into perspective. [read
more]
