At 10:48 AM 12/11/97 -0600, you wrote:
>This is something akin to adding urls, to records for conference
>proceedings, which take users to either conference Web pages or database
>lists of papers contributed to the conferences.
-- snip --
> What I find perplexing is that these and
>the toc developments which are common sense to me, are deemed remarkable to
>some and for some reason, a development that must be defended.
I can give you examples where it causes us concern. In certain A&I
databases in the University of California's MELVYL catalog we allow users
to limit their searches to items for which we have the full text in digital
form. In essence, a user can say: only show me citations for items that I
can read here on the screen. We can do this because we have processed the
full text and have linked it to the MARC record.
When we started receiving monographic records with 856 fields, we thought
we could do the same thing - we thought that the presence of an 856 would
mean that the full text was immediately available online. Unfortunately, it
doesn't always mean that - it can also mean that something somehow related
to the item is available online. So we aren't quite sure how to present
this to the users as a simple search.
We can just treat the 856's as hyperlinks and not try to allow users to
limit their searches based on them. However, in a catalog of over 9 million
items where searches often retrieve hundreds of individual titles we find
that search limits based on the availability of the item are increasingly
useful. Some years from now, when more of the catalog is made up of digital
resources, this probably won't be necessary.
Also note that what the 856 contains is the URL, and that without a very
clear $3 subfield describing the materials specified, it isn't always clear
what the URL will retrieve, if not the whole document. It isn't a true
hyperlink, in the WWW sense, but a "location of materials described." If we
start receiving links to related items similar to those on Web pages, then
we have something that might be wonderful but that isn't appropriate in a
holdings field.
Here's a fairly typical record with an 856 from our catalog:
Davis, Ronald G., theatrical director.
Ronald G. Davis papers : [finding aid] / by Levi Damon Phillips. Davis,
Calif. : Dept. of Special Collections, General Library, University of
California, c1996.
Electronic location:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu:28008/ead/ucdavis/rgdavis/ Connect to the
finding aid online (site unrestricted)
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Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Library Automation
http://www.dla.ucop.edu/~kec
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