I’m not sure how I feel about being typecast as the anti-SRU guy, but your points are valid.

I’ll quickly agree that the challenge of making openurl readable is probably insoluble, but let’s at least make the URLs in our apps durable enough to be bookmarkable, blogable, IMable, emailable, and indexable (so it’s Googleable(?)).

Now back to “standards…” The’ slides are good, but they don’t speak to your first point about priority and reinvention. What Coates couldn’t say, because the decision was made far above his head, was that successful organizations know when to change their game. Yahoo!’s acquisition of so many internet properties (and Coates himself) in the past year shows they know this.

What would we think of Yahoo! if they’d stuck to their old game? Would we respect them for claiming they did internet portals first? Would we care?

We need to think critically about our standards. MARC and SRU and others we love (and love to hate) may have been first, but there are substantially similar standards in broader use outside libraries.

counterpoint, marc, sru, who moved my cheese, yahoo!

However, point #5 is much more difficult than just /item/isbn/1234567890x in most real world scenarios.

Take articles for instance. Yes, some may have standard identifiers (dois, pmids, etc.), but many, many do not. And the doi isn’t even that friendly, anyway.

As I struggle to make a link resolver that “works better”, I’m still finding it nigh-on-impossible to improve on the readability of the openurl (and still actually be able to resolve anything).

I’m not sure #5 is ultimately all that important (although, yes, containing all of the information in a hash or behind session identifiers is wrong — and maybe what you’re actually getting at).

[tags]standards, rebuttal[/tags]