TechEssence.info

Dorothea Salo has already written an introduction to Unicode with some mention of UTF-8, but let me do a little venting here. There’s some dense technical detail here (or maybe I’m the one who’s being dense); the “so what?” part is at the end.

I’ve taken a couple of weeks to mull over a comment I heard recently. Earlier this month, I spoke to a group of academic librarians, mostly non-techies, about how well we deliver our search services to a user population that has literally grown up with Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.

To anyone who was working in libraries more than a few years ago, the combination of widespread OpenURL support and smart link resolvers has an aura of deep magic to it. Add in a healthy e-journal collection and it seems almost miraculous, when everything works right. Vendor X has a link in their database going to Vendor Y’s resolver, which has a link to the full text on Vendor Z’s site (or tells you about ILL, document delivery options, or – heavens forfend! – print copies in the library). Seamless interoperability – just add good citation data.