Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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f<strong>in</strong>d all articles that reference Verg. Aen. regardless of the language they are written <strong>in</strong>). They also
require, as Romanello admitted, a high level of participation by both classical e-journals and relevant
digital collections <strong>in</strong> terms of implement<strong>in</strong>g such microformats and CTS protocols, a situation that
seems unlikely.
Another approach to the challenge of semantic l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g has been <strong>in</strong>troduced by a project between the
Classics Department at Cornell University, which hosts the editor of the L’Année Philologique on the
Internet, and Cornell University Library (Ruddy 2009). This project was awarded a plann<strong>in</strong>g grant
from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore us<strong>in</strong>g OpenURL 177 to provide l<strong>in</strong>ks from
canonical citations <strong>in</strong> L’Année Philologique to their full text <strong>in</strong> both commercial and open-access
classics digital libraries. OpenURL was chosen because it provides a uniform l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g syntax that was
system- and vendor-<strong>in</strong>dependent and m<strong>in</strong>imized the cost of creat<strong>in</strong>g and ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g l<strong>in</strong>ks. Other
stated advantages of OpenURL were that it easily allowed both one-to-many l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g and “appropriate
copy l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g,” or the ability to l<strong>in</strong>k a user to content they are licensed to see. For example, if a user
from outside the library community tried to access a restricted resource such as the TLG, he or she
would be directed to the PDL.
One of the major project tasks therefore was to create a metadata format that could “reliably reference
canonical citations” (Ruddy 2009). The encod<strong>in</strong>g of classical author names was particularly
problematic s<strong>in</strong>ce OpenURL metadata presupposes a modern Western name for an author. Ruddy
reasoned that any metadata format would have to allow multiple ways of encod<strong>in</strong>g author forms. In
terms of citation structure itself, they did not adopt the CTS but <strong>in</strong>stead chose an abstract approach to
recognize the typical hierarchical structure of works.
In addition to metadata challenges there were a number of implementation issues. With the normal use
of OpenURL, the resolution of a l<strong>in</strong>k to a resource is left to a user’s local l<strong>in</strong>k resolver. The type of
solution chosen by this project, however, <strong>in</strong>cludes provid<strong>in</strong>g an extra level of detailed knowledge, and,
as Ruddy noted, only “uncerta<strong>in</strong> commercial <strong>in</strong>centive for l<strong>in</strong>k resolver vendors.” To solve this issue,
Ruddy proposed and consequently created a “doma<strong>in</strong>-specific community-supported knowledge base”
that was ultimately titled the Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB). 178 The f<strong>in</strong>al prototype
solution implemented by the project was to use the CWKB as an <strong>in</strong>termediate resolver/knowledge base
that could augment and normalize metadata values, provide specialized l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>formation, and
support access to free resources for users without a local l<strong>in</strong>k resolver. The basic user scenario they
envisioned <strong>in</strong>volved a user click<strong>in</strong>g on a canonical text reference <strong>in</strong> a JSTOR article or L’Annee article
abstract that was encoded with an OpenURL that would then direct the user to the CWKB (which
would provide a normalized authority form of author and title and provide a list of services for that
work), then to the local l<strong>in</strong>k resolver (if one was available), and f<strong>in</strong>ally to a HTML page with l<strong>in</strong>k
options such as the library catalog, <strong>in</strong>terlibrary loan, text <strong>in</strong> orig<strong>in</strong>al language, or text <strong>in</strong> translation. If
some users did not have a l<strong>in</strong>k resolver, the service could direct them to appropriate free resources by
redirect<strong>in</strong>g them to the CWKB. Ruddy argued that this model could have wide applications, s<strong>in</strong>ce it
could be “useful to any discipl<strong>in</strong>e that cites works <strong>in</strong>dependent of specific editions or translations” and
also offered one solution for cha<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g l<strong>in</strong>k resolvers and knowledge bases together to provide enhanced
services to users.
177 http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/openurl/default.htm
178 http://www.cwkb.org/