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SFX



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.