Summon: OpenURL Challenges with Providers Indexing Articles at Different Levels of Granularity

• Product: Summon

When publishers make their content available via other providers, each provider may represent the content at different levels of granularity. For example, one provider might group a section of sub-articles into a larger article under a single title, whereas another provider might index the content more granularly at the sub-article level. These differences in granularity of indexing can sometimes cause OpenURL linking to fail when the metadata in the Summon record differs enough from the metadata indexed by the provider from which the library accesses the content.

Discovery tools like Summon are unable to resolve such limitations of OpenURL linking because the Summon record contains the best possible metadata for the item, based on the providers that have contributed metadata for that item. To alter the Summon record so that the metadata matches a particular provider s metadata would help one library but negatively affect another library who accesses the content from another provider.

To work around limitation of OpenURL linking:

• Summon has continued to expand its Direct Linking technology that provides more reliable linking than the OpenURL technology standard. It is unlikely, however, that Direct Linking will ever be able to 100% eliminate the need for OpenURL linking to some content.
• Through library instruction, some libraries inform their users that often times an item is available through more than one resource, so users should look for additional article links provided by the link resolver, as it is likely another link will work successfully.
  • Additionally a link resolver provides journal links along with article links, so if need be a user can go to the journal page and navigate on their own to the article.

ProQuest is a strong supporter of publishers, content providers, libraries, and discovery services working together to develop standards for handling content granularity. For more information on some of the complexities involved when dealing with granular content discovery, please check out this NISO webinar.

• Date Created: 9-Feb-2014
• Last Edited Date: 20-Oct-2016
• Old Article Number: 8811