Making SFX link to dissertation and thesis full text objects is a big project. It's fairly easy to get SFX to do something with the citation; it gets more difficult when that "something" involves consistently delivering the user to the full text.
Many dissertations and theses are offered as electronic full text through the product ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text (DTFT). The global DTFT target requires "genre=dissertation" to be present in the OpenURL but most A&I databases don't index dissertations this way. Rather, they index the contents of Dissertation Abstracts, presumably because this is a comparatively easy way to acquire a broad swath of dissertation and thesis citations. The result of this practice, however, is that when these A&I databases are SFX sources, they transmit OpenURLs that mark up dissertation citations as if they were journal articles.* You can make full text dissertation linking work around this problem by fooling SFX into thinking that it's linking from journal article citations to journal article full text. Many SFX customers have already done so and, as of Monday, K-State is one of them.
Recent Comments