TechEssence.info

A colleague forwarded an announcement to me in which an open web-based reference management service announced it now supports OpenURLs as if that were the end of it. Unfortunately, it's only the beginning, and a rough one at that.

This site clearly expects all of the following to be true about their user community:

1. They can view the term OpenURL without immediately losing interest.
2. They understand why they should care (that is, what it can do for them).
3. They can find the appropriate base URL for the OpenURL resolver of their institution.

I find it hard to imagine that the users of this site -- which is for scholars and not limited by any means to librarians -- can get past the barriers presented by items 1) and 2) above. It isn't that they are stupid or ill-informed, it's just that they shouldn't have to know about this crap. It should be plumbing that they never need to bother with. That they are sometimes expected to deal with it is our failure, not theirs.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume for a moment that the users of this particular site are not your average users -- they have no lives and they love to ferret out technical arcana that most mortals spurn in favor of more common pursuits. Lord help them.

If they are truly savvy, then they could perhaps go to OCLC’s OpenURL Gateway while they are on campus, and if their campus resolver is registered they can get the base URL of the appropriate OpenURL resolver. That’s a lot of “ifs”.

If they don’t know about that, or if it doesn’t work (perhaps they are at home, for example), then they are left to flail about looking for the URL they need. You can try this at home. Try two things that a library user might attempt in trying to find the base URL of their OpenURL resolver:

1. Go to your library web site and browse and/or search for the base URL of your OpenURL resolver (assuming you have one).
2. Search Google on “openurl resolver” and the name of your library.

Good luck on either.

The point is this: The technical infrastructure that makes something possible is only the first step of a long process to make something usable.

That, after all, is what creating useful library services is all about. The first step is understanding our users -- what they want to be able to do and how they think about it. Without that essential understanding we might as well be linking to nowhere.