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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.

Perhaps that magical aura contributes to a sense that the process must be incomprehensible to non-technical staff. It may also be why we continue to put up with so many shoddy implementations:

• I worked with a librarian last week who is steadfastly trying to enable OpenURL linking in an journal index her campus subscribes to. It’s a reasonably well known database, coming from a very well known vendor. And yet, every citation it sends to our link resolver fails to connect to full text because it includes no page numbers.

  Please read that again. This database tries to communicate information about journal article citations, without including page numbers.

  No fooling – citations need page numbers to get to the right article? Who’da thunk it?

• Another database I encounter occasionally looks at every article and says, if the article is on pages 63 through 72, that the article is on pages “63-72“ (right) and that its starting page number is “63-72“ (very, very wrong, and likely to break full text links).

• Then there’s the metasearch product that takes a name like “de las Fuentes, Maria” and constructs an OpenURL with “de“ as the last name and “las Fuentes Maria“ as the first name.

• Several vendors we work with get so flummoxed handling book chapters that they end up sending a mishmash of book and article information, all too often sending the title and author of the chapter and no information about the book except the year. Try tracking that citation down at a busy reference desk.

Aside from some therapeutic venting, where am I going with this? We pay dearly for these indexing/abstracting databases; we pay dearly for full text, notably including electronic journals; the ability to link accurately from one to another has allowed us to maximize the value derived from both expenses.

In an age when search engines are a ubiquitous technology, one of the few unique services we get from these vendors should be accurate handling of clean, organized citation data. Half a decade into the era of citation linking, the OpenURL→resolver→full text pathway can no longer be a grafted-on, garbage in-garbage out, semi-permanent prototype, beta-quality service.

So, Mr. Database Vendor, if you’re looking for a way to maintain a perceived value for your product in the face of Google Scholar (ooh, look, now Microsoft is getting into that act, too…), take a look at your support for citation linking. Get it working right, and get it working right now.