Friday Afternoon Session

Just attended a session where two guys presented their recent papers.

1. Librarian from Yale Science libraries talked about twitter in libraries. He is a very progressive thinker. He made contentions like "blogs are old fashioned," I think his libraries twitter is 'YaleSCIlib' if you want to follow the techniques his staff is using.

2. The next presenter was talking about a study of OpenURL link resolvers. At Madison we know this product as 'Find It' or SFX(product name). Not sure what or if Illinois uses. The project was 'KBART' 'Knowledge base and resource tools' or something like that

For those unfamiliar with OpenURL. Basically it is a standard of embedding metadata in a URL for resource retrieval. So when you push the find it button...the product grabs the metadata of the citation and then runs it against a "knowledge base" of resources and links you to an access point. Not a good explanation I know. If there are any OpenURL wizards reading please post a comment and enlighten us.

There are a lot of frustrations when using these resolvers like SFX. The study was exploring some of these quality control issues like retrieving resources of unconventional formats like newspapers whose citations include things like 'Section A' which is not a common part of a journal citation, for example. He also mentioned that the inaccuracy of data input and the inconsistency of it leads to a lot of inefficiency with these resolvers. The main idea here is maximizing the use and accessibility of these resources that we spend countless amounts of dollars on and are sometimes lost or not accessed because of technical downfall. He doesn't have answers ...he is just finding the roots of the problems at this point. Confused? OpenURL is a sticky topic...your not alone.

-Roy