Cross Browser Support in Library Databases

Today was an interesting day dealing with an issue we have been having with the Gale Group OneFile database. Apparently, OpenURL linking via SFX will only work properly if you are using Internet Explorer for a web browser. It took me two days to discover that this was the issue because (silly me) I assumed that database vendors would make their products cross-browser compatible. I tested the darn problem in several browsers on the PC and Mac just not IE because I loathe it and on the Mac is makes everything else look like crappy.

I’ve sent my feedback on this issue to the vendor but when the tech support people told me “we only support IE”, I had a pretty good idea of where my feedback would go. So now I’m trying to determine if there is a different solution to the problem (rather than demanding our users use a particular browser). OneFile contains all the content from several other Gale databases including Literature Resource Center, Expanded Academic, and Health Reference Center. Ironically, the targets for most of these databases that I have tested don’t seem to have the browser compatibility issue that OneFile has. The only problem is that some when given only a journal title they don’t take the user to a table of contents. So I’m faced with several different choices.

• Turn on all the seperate pieces that make up OneFile (turn off OneFile) and live with the fact that some of them point to table of contents and some do not
• Turn on all the seperate pieces that make up OneFile (turn off OneFile) and write display logic rule to make fulltext links that don’t link to table of contents show up only if no other fulltext source is available
• Leave OneFile on and write display logic rules to have it only show when it is the only fulltext available (limiting the the number of times that it hurts people not using IE)

I need to think about this issue some more before I decide exactly what to do. I need to assess the extent of the problem by looking at our usage statistics and running an overlap analysis in Serial Solutions to see how often OneFile is the only source for fulltext. In the meantime, I will also fervently hope that perhaps some vendors will notice this post and be reminded that a big part of usability is cross browser and cross platform compatibility. Libraries want their databases to be accessible to the largest number of library users possible and consider cross browser and platform compatibility in their e-resource acquisition decision-making.

Update:

Gale Tech Support seems to think that it is a problem with the fact that the LOC_ID doesn’t seem to be being passed in the URL which means the link relies on authentication cookies. (ie. that the user was in the database before) Not helpful. I’m going to play more with the target parser and parse_params in SFX to see if I can fix the issue.

Update 6/20/2005

Other people seem to be having problems with this target as well and SFX Help knows about the problem and seems to be working on it. I’m hoping that they find a solution so I don’t have to resort to turning on other targets to the same content instead.