Date: November 7, 2006
To: Bibliographers at LAPTOC Participant Institutions
From: Mary Jo Zeter, Serials Working Group Chair
Re: OpenURL in LAPTOC Database
I am pleased to announce that participant libraries using the OpenURL protocol will now be able to add this enhancement to the database. This means that your local OpenURL software's icon will appear in LAPTOC records, allowing users to check the availability of cited journals in your collection, accessing the full text if available, or initiate a borrowing request via the ILLiad interlibrary loan service.
You may wonder why it has taken us so long to make this announcement. I worked for a long time with Sam Jones, the LARRP programmer at U-Texas, to try to find a way to push lender information from a LAPTOC record into the ILLiad request form. This, along with an explanatory note, would have "guided" borrowing requests for articles to the inputting libraries, and supported the original concept of free and expedited document delivery between participant libraries. Based on the OpenURL standards it could have been possible, but ILLiad simply does not provide for a way to get request-specific lender information from an OpenURL request into an appropriate field, nor does it allow for notes of any kind. Therefore, ILLiad article requests from LAPTOC will probably not be directed to the inputting libraries by your ILL departments, nor will ILL staff see any kind of note about the special borrowing provisions between participants.
There is some evidence that ILL staff had been directing borrowing requests from LAPTOC to libraries of their choosing in any case, particularly when articles are available from preferred borrowing networks, so there may be little change in practice with the implementation of OpenURL. However, since LAPTOC documentation on the Web and elsewhere clearly states that participants agree to fill LAPTOC requests free of charge for other participant libraries, the Serials Working Group will need to discuss the ramifications of a borrowing system that cannot support this aspect of the original agreement between participant institutions, and bring a recommendation to the LARRP Advisory Committee. In the end, LARRP Coordinator Scott Van Jacob and I decided that the clear advantages of OpenURL linking capabilities warranted its implementation despite being unable to accommodate directions to ILL staff to send LAPTOC article requests to the inputting libraries.
A Web page with the link information necessary for your local OpenURL service to function in LAPTOC can be found at: http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/query/ill_message.jsp
Please pass it on to your systems staff. Once the appropriate values (the urls for your link resolver and OpenURL link image) for your institution are included in the properly formatted link, that link will set the necessary cookies for OpenURL to function. In other words, your systems staff will substitute this new link for the old link for accessing LAPTOC, and users will then be able to use the OpenURL requests.
My sincere thanks to all for your contributions to LAPTOC.
