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Bridging Digital Gaps: WebBridge Implementation

Adam Chandler, Bill Kara, and Scott Wicks

The growth and complexity of CUL’s digital collections creates an ever-changing landscape, and the Library continues to explore ways to make the searching, discovery, and access of our online collections more seamless and efficient. During 2005, CUL sought to improve the linking to the Library’s full-text holdings more completely and reliably by replacing the current link resolver. An OpenURL link resolver is a piece of software that accepts a citation (from a variety of different networked sources) formatted in the OpenURL syntax, compares the citation against a local holdings database, and then displays links to the full text, if possible, or to other services such as the library catalog or interlibrary loan.

After a market scan by Karen Calhoun, Adam Chandler, Marcy Rosenkrantz, and Ed Weissman during the summer, a WebBridge Trial Task Force was established to investigate the quality of a potentially more-effective link-resolver product, III’s WebBridge. This task force, led by Adam Chandler, included Jesse Koennecke, Maureen Morris, Liisa Mobley, Ed Zieba, Michal Jacyna, and Zoe Stewart-Marshall. WebBridge was installed on a local server last fall as part of a trial. The Task Force concluded that WebBridge is a flexible product that would fit well into our existing electronic resource management work flow and improve reliability and speed for the user in moving from citation to full text.

Since III’s WebBridge is only a piece of software, the challenge was to configure the right syntax for each resource (Proquest, ScienceDirect, Project Euclid, etc.). After a successful trial (more than 36,000 of Cornell’s online titles were successfully tested), a phased implementation of WebBridge was set to begin this March. Within the first week of the phased implementation, the nineteen SilverPlatter databases, including such titles as AGELINE, AGRICOLA, and BIOSIS, and OCLC databases, including EconLit, ERIC, GeoRefS, GPO, LegalPeriodical, MEDLINE, and MLA Bibliography, were redirected through WebBridge and now point to the WebBridge link resolver. Look for the “Get it! Cornell” link in the results set of a database search. 

Bridging

get it

Every silver lining has a black cloud. A link resolver is only as successful as the data provided by the database. Frequent users of various databases, most glaringly those produced by SilverPlatter (see Philospher’s Index or Bibliography of Native North Americans) will find that despite the shift to WebBridge, the user continues to be challenged in the move between citation and full text. The WebBridge Task Force encourages anyone who has contacts with database producers to tell them how they may improve their success in a competitive industry by supporting the OpenURL standard. Still other database producers have not even attempted to support a link resolver. In the meantime, we encourage those who fund citation and abstract databases to review what is available in the marketplace that will help a user succeed in the quest to locate full text through application of OpenURL links. Put yourself in the user’s place, and try out these databases for yourself. What is your experience?

Over the next couple weeks, the WebBridge Task Force will complete the migration of exisiting services to WebBridge (Find Articles, Google Scholar, MyContents, and RefWorks). Once that work is complete, they will connect additional services to the link resolver (ISI Web of Knowledge; Historical Abstracts; America, History and Life; Art Index Retrospective; and many more).

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