Full-Text Links: Fish, or Fishing License? Ken Varnum Senior Program Manager for Discovery, Delivery, and Learning Analytics University of Michigan Library @varnum | varnum@umich.edu | #litaforum

Based on research conducted by Kenyon Stuart, Ken Varnum, and Judith Ahronheim, published as “Measuring Journal Linking Success from a Discovery Service,” Information Technologies and Libraries, 2015 (34:1). doi: 10.6017/ital.v34i1.5607

Two-Pronged Research Project (1) Full-text links from article discovery tool (2) Random sampling of full-text links Full-Text Links: Fish, or Fishing License? @varnum

Summon-Provided Links Interface uses the Summon API Selectively adds a feedback link that goes to a Qualtrics survey Full-Text Links: Fish, or Fishing License? @varnum

Full-Text Links: Fish, or Fishing License? @varnum Error Reporting Form In Qualtrics, we give options for normal problems, an other box, a comment box, and an email address request (so we can reply to our users). Full-Text Links: Fish, or Fishing License? @varnum

Summary of Reports From March 2012-October 2015…. 6,618 problem reports 2,901,693 article searches 2,245,296 clicks on “MGet It” (full text) Change to index-enhanced direct linking was in

Getting to the Full Story User reports valuable… …But not the whole story Randomized sampling 2011: ArticlesPlus records 2012-13: Quarterly 2011 - 685 of 10,497 articles plus records clicked on by users (selected randomly, after de-duping) 2012 - two records from each of the 100 serials most accessed through 360 Link. searched for each serial title within Summon using the serial’s ISSN or the serial’s title. 1st article — newest first sort, 2nd or 3rd page. 2nd article — oldest first sort, 2nd or 3rd page. Full-Text Links: Fish, or Fishing License? @varnum

Summary of Samples 300-article samples, tested by 2 people each From article on ITAL website 300-article samples, tested by 2 people each

Kinds of Full Text Links From article on ITAL website

Direct Link Success Rates From article on ITAL website

Summary Conclusions More than 95% of direct- linked articles led to the correct resource. About 60% of One-click (OpenURL) articles led to the correct resource. 20% of OpenURL links failed

What Does It Mean? We conclude…. More work is needed if OpenURL is to continue as a working standard Trend to direct linking creates the risk of vendor lock-in Recommend that libraries actively collaborate on identifying patterns of failure in OpenURL link resolution Vendor lock-in — because the vendor-created direct links will not work after the library’s business relationship with the vendor ends. An OpenURL is less tightly bound to the vendor that provided it. This lock-in increases the cost of changing vendors. The emergence of direct links is a two-edged sword: users gain reliability but libraries lose flexibility and the ability to adapt.