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SFX
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What is SFX?
SFX is all about linking.
Students used to working on the Web expect to be able
to easily link from one information resource to
another.
Although much of a library's collection is in
electronic form, and is accessed via the Web, library
information resources act independently from each other.
For instance, when a student finds a journal article in
an article database, she has to do another separate
search in the catalog to see if the library has the
journal in which the article is published.
SFX allows users to seamlessly link between
electronic resources.
Now when a student
finds a journal article in a database, she can click on
the SFX button to bring up links to all the places the
article is available in the library's
collections.
Not only will SFX show the holdings
of the paper copy of the journal in the library catalog,
but it might also find several electronic databases with
full-text versions of the article and a site on the open
Internet with a copy of the article. SFX allows the
library to direct the user to the most appropriate copy
of the resource, in particular letting the user know
about resources they might not have otherwise
considered.
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