LibraryFind and SFX
April 3rd, 2007
So when we released LF 0.7 I was pretty pleased that we were able to include our own OpenURL resolver. The marriage of metasearch and OpenURL is one of those no-brainer concepts — but in order for it to work really well, I wanted OpenURL resolution directly a part of LF. For OSU and anyone without an OpenURL resolver, this will work great. However, for those that have taken the time to purchase and setup their own tools (like SFX), having OpenURL resolution within the application represented a problem. Soo…
Thanks to Ross Singer, who provided some documentation and the location to the GA Tech. SFX server to test on, I’ve been able to add SFX support into LF. This means that by setting a config value in the environment.rb file, one can configure LF to work with SFX or the Local LF OpenURL repository.
Of course, the next question might be, will we support other openurl resolvers? The answer to that question is easy — sure if they provide an open API for query. SFX makes it easy to retrieve an XML representation of the request results making the service easy to use and parse. Of course, at present, this means that certain vendor tools are off limits. Innovative Interface’s OpenURL software for example, would be out-of-bounds because it lacks such API support. So if you have a vendor that currently doesn’t support an API that returns XML with your OpenURL tool, talk to them. Get them to support it. As soon as they do, give us a holler because support can then be added in just a couple of lines of code.
Posted by jaf