About Umlaut

Umlaut is an open source project originally developed by Ross Singer while at Georgia Tech, and subsequently worked on quite a bit by Jonathan Rochkind of Johns Hopkins University. Umlaut is sometimes called a “link-resolver front end” or a “middle-tier link resolver”. In fact, the Umlaut is a link resolver, in the sense that it receives OpenURL requests–usually representing a citation for a scholarly work–and responds with information on services available related to that citation–most significantly, with electronic availability. However, unlike most typical link resolver products (such as SFX), the Umlaut does not manage it’s own “knowledge base” of information on what titles an institution possesses from what vendors, and how to link to them. Umlaut relies on SFX–accessed through the SFX API–for that information and service.

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Check for Public Access Versions

To discover if an open access version of an item is available, Umlaut does an author/title keyword search of IndexData’s indexes of OAISter and Open Content Alliance freely available text.. This is imperfect because all we can do is an author title keyword search. But when it works, it’s cool.

OPAC Integration

It’s also possible to integrate Umlaut into an OPAC, so not only the full text links, but also those ’see also’ links (to WorldCat, isbndb, Amazon, etc) show up.

Potential Future Directions

We have succeeded in de-coupling the link resolver knowledge base (still held within SFX in our case) with the link resolver software (Umlaut, which provides some services beyond what SFX does).Any other link resolver with an API, Umlaut could be hooked up to also, in theory, if someone wanted to write the connector. Could that lead to a commoditization of the link resolver knowledge base_ so we could buy knowledge base maintenance from whoever does the best job without worrying about the quality of their software? Theoretically, maybe some day.

More nearer term, additional features I want to add to Umlaut include:

• Rochester “Getting Users Fulltext” style code to skip right to the full text, skipping content-provider metadata pages.
• Google Books search to complement the OCA and Gutenberg searches I’ve got.
• Connection to OCLC Identities
• xISBN/thingISBN use. (Some thought is required in how to integrate this while avoiding false positives). Bowker ISSN service for metadata enhancement. OCLC xISSN? Integrate preceding/succeeding title information from OPAC or xISSN?
• Integrate my various local document delivery services into menu of options when full text isn’t available.

Are you interested in working with Umlaut?

We are looking for more development partners for Umlaut. I say ‘development partners’ because it is still at the stage where it’s going to be a bit of work to get it deployed–and you’re probably going to have to write code to get it to talk to your OPAC. At this point, to use/participate in Umlaut, your library probably needs to have a programmer on staff who can devote some time to it (you don’t necessarily need a ruby/rails expert; I wasn’t before I started working with Umlaut). But I am interested in providing support and help for people to do that—and I’m interested in people who want to add even more services to Umlaut. The more institutions we can get using Umlaut, if we can build a community, then our investment in the software is more secure, it’s more likely to continue as a successful and full featured project. Interested? Talk to me.

For those looking for technical details to give our Umlaut the run-through, the base url is:

http://findit.library.jhu.edu/resolve