Seamless movement in electronic databases: The Problem, my Experience, and a Solution

The Problem
This is a quote in one of my text books, Information Seeking in Electronic Environments by Gary Marchionini: “Systems that support descriptive and semantic indexing should allow users to select from many documents and to move into, around, and back out of those documents in seamless ways. The current systems require users to execute a discrete set of actions using different input-output mechanisms at each step. Queries are typically specified according to a query language or form screen, and a list of titles or other surrogates is then displayed on a different screen or window. Different menus or commands are then used for browsing through the retrieved list and selecting an item for display. This results in yet another screen or window with possibly another set of commands or menus to browse through the item and return to a previous step. In electronic environments, representations for collections and specific objects should be represented and controlled in common and compatible ways.” (143)

My Experience
I underlined this whole section in my book because it is a feeling of frustration that I have had myself, and I think it is a frustration of most users of databases, or in a broader sense, information seekers in electronic environments. It is also the reason that companies like Apple who have spent a lot of time thinking about “seamless solutions” do very well with consumers. Further I think it is the main reason high school students prefer going directly to Google for their searches than to our OPACs or our databases. People who want to find information want to stay focused on that information problem. They feel frustration when they encounter the new information problem of learning the database interface and even more absurd, finding that the interface changes as they switch databases in their search. Believe me I’m not trying to take the tenacity that you must have out of searching for information, I just want students to spend more time reading the source than reading another help file about finding that source. I ran across this gem: by Calvin Mooer: “An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him to not have it" (American Documentation, 11(3), p.ii.). For most high school students not having the information is far less painful than learning the database interface.

One Solution
Standardization is the only solution to get proprietary databases to play-nicely together. Enter one solution: OpenURL link servers. I noticed in going through the LOTSS tutorials that the King Library uses SFX, allowing user searches to resolve in copies held by the library even if they are in a different database than the one being searched. The endorsement of ANSI/NISO of Herbert Van de Sompel and Patrick Hochstenbach’s OpenURL framework is what has led many to adopt this as a solution. SFX was certainly the first and most popular, but now, “Many other companies . . . market link server systems, including Openly Informatics (1Cate — acquired by OCLC in 2006; rebranded as WorldCat Link Manager in 2007), Swets (SwetsWise Linker), Serials Solutions 360 Link(formerly known as Article Linker), Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (WebBridge), EBSCO (LinkSource), Ovid (LinkSolver), SirsiDynix (Resolver), Fretwell-Downing (OL2), TDNet (TOUR), Bowker (Ulrichs Resource Linker) and Infor (Vlink).” (OpenURL. (2008, February 19). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:57, February 24, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OpenURL&oldid=192475711).
I would like to read a consumer’s comparison of these different companies services to find out what the costs and features of each these is. I’m also curious when the King Library adopted SFX and what the process was like.