Working the workaround: DTFT Local

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.

This project, which I've called DTFT Local, has been shuffling up and down my to-do list for a long time. It's finally done and, even better, it's working. Many thanks are due to the people who in some way prodded me to finish:

• Geoff Sinclair and Margery Tibbets for their ELUNA 2009 presentations** on manipulating SFX's dissertation linking
• Geoff (again) for updating his local target parser and writing instructions on how to build this service (both available here)
• Harish Maringanti for Perl advice at just the right time
• The Library Interfaces Team members for prompt and thorough testing of this service's many iterations

If your service desk and Interlibrary Loan staff members are frustrated by the time and energy they spend fielding dead-end dissertation links and if your institution has access to ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text, you might want to consider implementing a DTFT Local target of your own. This post describes one way to do that.

First, you're going to need to be comfortable with some intermediate and advanced SFX administration skills:

• Create local object portfolios for existing objects
• Create local objects
• Create a local target, target service, and User Parameter
• Upload (and possibly modify) a local target parser
• Create and modify Display Logic rules

Even if you've never done these things before you shouldn't automatically stop reading. Most of these tasks are described in the SFX documentation and there's a first time for everything. I do recommend that you do this work in a non-production SFX instance and that you back up any global files you're about to modify.

Second, you're going to want to visit Geoff Sinclair's "SFX and Dissertations" page for some instructions and downloadable files. There's no need to repeat Geoff's instructions but I will add a few tips.

The parse param for the local getFullText target service can be as simple as:
url=http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl
& clientid=$$CLIENTID
To make this work, though, you need a corresponding U/P (User Parameter) that sets the value of the $$CLIENTID variable called by this parse param. Any other active ProQuest target service in your KB should contain a U/P with your institution's correct client id. Create a new U/P for this target service by following this path:
SFX Admin home > KB Manager > User Parameters > Add New Item
Complete the form by selecting the name of your local target service and the correct institute. The flag name is $$CLIENTID; the flag value is your institution's client id, usually a 5-digit number. To confirm that the new U/P is present, navigate through SFX Admin to your local target service and verify that the U/P button is visible in the list of available target services. If you can't find you institution's client id or for more information about this U/P, see the ProQuest section of the SFX 3.0 Target Configuration Guide.

Geoff's latest version of this target parser improves the title search function by modifying in two ways the title to be searched:

• Removes some punctuation from the object's title
• Eliminates words of three or fewer letters

I tested these changes and found them to be an improvement over an older version of the target parser, but the results were not as reliable as I want our production services to be. Very long titles often screwed up the search, as did some diacritics present in non-English dissertation titles. With help from Harish, I modified the target parser to eliminate even more punctuation from the title and to limit what ProQuest actually searches to the first four words of four or more letters. In subsequent testing, this strategy improved the search results enormously but it has consequences you should be aware of:

• Acronyms of three or fewer letters will be eliminated from the search
• Titles containing commonly-used words of four or more letters may return more than one result

The K-State version of the target parser is available by request - just email me. I will also try to get it posted to EL Commons.

Third, assuming you now have a functioning getFullText target, you need to think about the Display Logic that will control the target's display on your Services Menu. Based on feedback from our staff and Library Interfaces Team members, we've implemented a pretty basic approach. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

1. When this target is available, the catalog link should never display.
   This is because our users clicked the catalog link and were directed to the print copies of Dissertation Abstracts sitting on our shelves. Since this publication isn't what the users were looking for, we wanted to prevent them from being led down this road.
2. When this target is available, the ILL link should always display.
   This is because not every dissertation has full text available in DTFT. SFX's usual Display Logic suppresses the ILL link in the presence of a getFullText link, but we wanted to override that behavior for this target only so users who did not find their item's full text could place an ILL request.

Display Logic rule 1 is pretty easy - add a new rule suppressing your catalog target when your DTFT Local target is available. For help, consult the SFX 3.0 General User's Guide under "Additional SFX Menu Configuration."

Display Logic rule 2 is more challenging because this basic behavior - "in the presence of A and under XYZ conditions, also show B" - is not configurable. The Display Logic rule creator just doesn't handle it. If you want this behavior, you have to write a wacky threshold that changes the rule to say, "If any getFullText target is available, do not show any getDocumentDelivery target unless one of these ISSNs is present." Here's how to do it:

• Find the rule that suppresses ILL in the presence of full text. It's one of the default rules that comes preconfigured in SFX and should be one of the first four.
• Click E to edit the rule
• At "Under the following condition," pull down the menu and select "threshold"
• Click Compose to see the familiar threshold composer window
• From the threshold compose window, pull down the "Needs" menu and select "rft.issn"
• Pull down the "condition" menu and select "not equal to"
• Fill in the blank box with one of the ISSNs from Geoff's list of journals for which you made local object portfolios for your local target
• Click Submit
• Confirm that the threshold looks like this:
  $obj->need('rft.issn','ne','0419-4209')
• Copy the line of text, then put your cursor at the end of the line
• Add a space, two pipe characters ( || means "or"), another space, and paste the text
• Change the second ISSN to be another from Geoff's list. It should now look like this:
  $obj->need('rft.issn','ne','0419-4209') || $obj->need('rft.issn','ne','0419-4217')
• Repeat these steps until you have a threshold that includes all the ISSNs on Geoff's list
• To include the book objects in this string of exceptions, you'll need to add something like this:
  $obj->need('rft.btitle','!~','/Dissertation Abstracts International/')
  which is to say, "a book title not matching the pattern "Dissertation Abstracts International"
• When you're finished with all the ISSNs and book titles, make sure your choice is "Replace existing threshold" and click Submit. Since this threshold is so long, you may not be able to see all of it in the Edit Display Logic Rule window, but it's all there and should work when you test it.
• You may find this copy/paste process easier in a text editor such as Notepad (don't use a word processor), but be sure to turn off word wrap before pasting the text into the Edit Display Logic Rule window.

If you implement these Display Logic rules (and even if you don't), you'll want to thoroughly test the service before putting it into production. It's helpful if a team of people can do this using multiple sources to generate dissertation requests. You should know that although DTFT Local works with dissertation requests sent from PsycINFO, it will not work if the citation is dated 2009 or newer. These dissertation citations have added ISBNs that thwart DTFT Local's journal article linking. I'm sure there will be some other workaround to catch these, but for now think of all those pre-2009 citations your users will be linking to.

Happy workaround!

*NB: Not all A&I databases do this, so the local target and target service described in this post will not solve all your full text dissertation linking problems.

**Geoff's slides for his talk, "Dissertations and OpenURL: State of the art / future state" are available here. Geoff also coined the phrase, "The workaround has become the work" that inspired the title of this post. Margery's slides for her talk, "Dissertation or Dissertation Abstracts" are available in the ELUNA 2009 meeting archives (password required).