Integration of simultaneous searching and reference linking across bibliographic resources on the web

Libraries and information providers are actively developing customized portals and gateway software designed to integrate secondary information resources such as A & I services, online catalogs, and publishers full-text repositories. This paper reports on a project carried out at the Grainger Engineering Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide web-based asynchronous simultaneous searching of multiple secondary information resources and integrated reference linking between bibliographic resources. The project has tested two different approaches to simultaneous broadcast searching. One approach utilizes custom distributed searchbots and shared blackboard databases. The other approach uses event-driven asynchronous HTTP queries within a single web script. The reference linking implementation is built around the application of OpenURL and Digital Object Identifier (DOI) technologies and the CrossRef metadata database within a proxy server environment.