SFX, a Linkalicious Service
By Karen G. Schneider
American Libraries Columnist
Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for June/July 2001
Most of us have a love-hate relationship with online databases and catalogs. On the one hand, they put an embarrassment of riches into the hands of your staff and patrons: journal articles, citations for books, encyclopedia entries, protein structures, phonebook information. . . . You know the drill. On the other hand, databases and catalogs tend to be vast, impersonal information trash barges that lead nowhere but to themselves.
Fortunately, the limitations of online databases and catalogs haven’t been lost on the high-tech crowd. Openly Informatics and Ex Libris are two companies that have been using OpenURL, an emerging protocol originally developed by Herbert van de Sompel (formerly of the University of Ghent, now at Cornell University).
The key is linkability. OpenURL provides the capability to develop linking servers—tools that allow OpenURL-compatible databases the ability “to present users with [a variety of] choices that are available to them at that particular library, so we don’t send them down blind paths,” says Karen Coyle of the University of California Digital Library.
For simplicity’s sake, I’ll focus on the Ex Libris product, called SFX—a play on the acronym used for “special effects,” says Nettie Lagace of library automation vendor Ex Libris, which now owns and licenses the SFX software.
You control the horizontal
The simple but extremely potent power of SFX is that it “allows the librarian to make decisions about the library’s own collection,” explained George Porter, a librarian at the California Institute of Technology closely involved in an SFX implementation. You, the librarians, decide ahead of time what options a search in an SFX-enabled database will provide—including retrieving full text, linking to a catalog search, doing a further search on the article’s subjects or authors, and searching the Web. (Caltech offers a link to protein databases in PubMed, for example.) The more OpenURL-aware databases you have, the more tightly integrated and customized the total search experience can be.
The library at Caltech uses SFX for its ISI scientific journal collection, Web of Science. The illustration for this article is from an SFX menu that was displayed after selecting an article citation found in Web of Science database search on the term “estrogenic.” You can see that this search leads the user to more resources—the database is no longer a dead end. The user could be searching a catalog, database, or whatever—anything that was capable of being an OpenURL-aware source that a search is started from.
In order to work with SFX, the Caltech library had to license at least some databases that were OpenURL-aware. Caltech also had to license the SFX software and install it on a server. (SFX currently runs on Linux and Solaris; if hosting a Unix-based server onsite isn’t practical, Ex Libris can host the SFX server for your library system.)
Next, Caltech librarians had to decide what to present when the user clicked on a SFX button. (The resources provided in the SFX menu—where your SFX search takes you—are called targets.) As you can see from the Caltech example, some of the choices include full-text content; a link to their Innovative catalog; a link to Ibid, the Caltech interlibrary loan service; additional search functions within Web of Science; and a general Web search with an option to select one of several search engines.
Then librarians had to provide the SFX server with the journal titles. The SFX server provides a lot of the underlying information needed to keep the database current—a major improvement over labor-intensive “manual” methods, such as cataloging journals in 856 fields. The SFX server is also smart enough that if an option isn’t available for a resource (such as full text), that option will be suppressed. Alternatively, if you have several options—say, a journal article available in three databases—you can, if you want, display links to all three full-text articles. (The OpenURL folks like to refer to the ability to link to the “appropriate copy,” but with all the talk about the Children’s Internet Protection Act these days, I’m a bit burned out on the term “appropriate.”) The point is, it’s up to you!
SFX and the single librarian
Give it a spin: go to the Web sites for SFX and Openly Informatics and tinker with their test servers. And ask your library automation and database vendors if their products are OpenURL-aware. Word on the street is that it isn’t that hard to implement. I’m already sold enough to want to discuss “OpenURL implementation” as a desirable if not required capability in RFPs. Anything that can make the search experience so sexy and special is on the top of my digital shopping list.
(Note: A session sponsored by the Reference and User Services Association’s Machine-Assisted Reference Section at ALA Annual Conference will provide live demos of this new service. See you on June 16 from 11:30–12:30 for a linkalicious good time!)
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