Holdings and Access criteria (was Changes vs. new element)

Dan pointed at a discussion in this area from the tail end of last year, so I thought I'd resurrect something I said at that time, which was along the lines of wondering whether we should have a way of describing the characteristics of those that can typically make use of a service or resource.

So a resource might only be accessible by a user using a device with an IP address in a certain range... or with a certain membership (only members of the library can access this resource) ... or with a certain authentication mechanism ... or with a personal subscription to a service etc.

This would seem useful in human readable terms when describing things ('this film is accessible to someone with a Netflix subscription', 'this item is accessible to someone who is a member of this library'), and also in machine readable terms - opening up the possibility of a service being able to combine the characteristics required for access with what it knows of a person to work out whether they should/are likely to be able to access the resource.

For me the acid test is a non-library scenario - the netflix/hulu usecase - given a tv programme/film of music I'd really like to know whether I can already access it as a Netflix/Hulu subscriber. I think this is essentially the 'appropriate copy' scenario OpenURL was designed to work with. If we can find a way of expressing this then it feels like it definitely has applicability outside the library sphere.

Any takers?

Owen

Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: owen@ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

On 2 Aug 2013, at 08:19, Alf Eaton <eaton.alf@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1 August 2013 20:03, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 8/1/13 11:05 AM, Dan Scott wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> If I can be permitted to fantasize about a library scenario for a
>>> moment, if the search engine recognized via your location or IP
>>> address that you were in or near a library, it could serve as your
>>> library catalogue and display the additional metadata when it was
>>> actually useful to you (much as it detects when you're looking up
>>> movies, it can show you the local movie listings, including name &
>>> address of the theatre, immediately rather than forcing you to click
>>> through).
>> 
>> 
>> That was my first fantasy as well. See:
>> 
>> http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2012/09/rich-snippets.html
> 
> That's kind of what Google Scholar does
> <https://www.google.com/intl/en/scholar/libraries.html>: IP address
> ranges and library serials holdings => appropriate links to article
> full text through the library resolver, when the library has access.
> It's particularly annoying that - as far as I know - libraries only
> publish this holdings file to Google, rather than making it available
> for everyone.
> 
> Keeping up-to-date with availabililty of particular items would be too
> much for a crawler, as it changes too quickly, so there would need to
> be a push API, like there is for Google Shopping
> <https://developers.google.com/shopping-content/>, updated with every
> availability change. Alternatively, as long as the library can resolve
> an OpenURL query, tools like <http://www.libraryextension.com/> can
> look up availability of single items on demand.
> 
> So, my fantasy would be:
> 
> a) a rel="holdings" link from the front page of every library to a
> paginated HTML list of all the library's holdings, marked up with
> microdata (and/or a paginated JSON-LD feed, as a bonus).
> 
> b) a rel="openurl" link from the front page of every library that
> points to the root of an OpenURL resolver, which would resolve queries
> to a single page marked up with availability information as microdata
> (and/or a JSON-LD item, as a bonus).
> 
> Alf
>

Received on Monday, 5 August 2013 13:04:43 UTC