Issues and Concerns

• Service Questions
  • What, if any, level of linking is "core service" that we want to provide for all databases?
  • Should "core" linking work the same across databases, or is some variation in functionality acceptable as we move from vendor to vendor?
  • What level of vendor dependency are we willing to tolerate?
  • Leveraging: how to integrate vendors' solutions without creating unwanted dependency
• Scalability
  • New sources require new components
  • No common standards for search/retrieval or document identification
  • Some sites using javascript to build URLs on the fly; increases complexity of parsing required since parser can't just ignore script as it does now
  • Use of applets will probably break what is basically a text-based approach
• Brittleness: radical changes to proxied site can break components
• Maintenance: costs of maintaining detailed holdings information looks high for single institution
• Response Time: may not be a big factor since lookup is done only for items user has selected