The Development of the NISO Committee AX's OpenURL Standard

This paper describes the development of the OpenURL standard and how it will impact librarians and information technologists. This article is based on information provided via email inquires sent to members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Committee AX responsible for producing this standard. The OpenURL syntax is designed to enable transportation of metadata and identifiers about referenced works and their context from any information resource to a local link server. This allows libraries to create locally-controlled and managed link servers that enable the delivery of context-sensitive linking in and across their collections. OpenURL is a developing standard that provides a mechanism for transporting bibliographic metadata about objects between information services via the Internet. (1) The standard is based on the idea that links should lead a user to appropriate resources. Currently, Web links do not take into account the identity of the user as they link to the same Web page. When more than one institution provides access to copies of the same electronic article, the link from the citation to the full-text article should point to a copy that is available to the user. Since different users have access to different resources, the link should resolve who gets what. The link must be able to package metadata and identifiers describing the information object, and send this package to a server that resolves the link. The resolver should take into account the user's identity when resolving the metadata into specific articles. In the OpenURL framework, information resources allow for open linking by including a hook, a programmer-defined customization, along with each metadata description that they present to users. This hook presents itself in the user's browser as a clickable link called an OpenURL. (2) This article describes the development of the OpenURL standard and how it will impact librarians and information technologists. Much of the information provided here was obtained via e-mail inquiries sent to members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Committee AX responsible for producing the OpenURL standard. See appendix A for the list of questions submitted to the committee members. This standards committee, formally designated NISO AX, consists of seventeen members and four observers from diverse backgrounds and workplaces (libraries, publishers, and service providers.) See appendix B for complete biographical information on the respondents. History The OpenURL concept evolved from research by Herbert Van de Sompel and his team at the University of Ghent in Belgium. (3) In 1998 they began to explore the role of local link servers for libraries to facilitate context-sensitive linking between heterogeneous scholarly resources. (4) As a result of this work, the first context-sensitive link server, titled SFX, was developed. Ex Libris was one of the technology partners involved in this experimental work, and Oren Beit-Arie, Ex Libris Group vice president for research, was assigned to the project. In February 2000, Ex Libris purchased all rights to develop and market the SFX technology. (5) SFX-URL was developed as a protocol for transporting metadata from sources to the SFX server. In March 2000, Van de Sompel, Hochsteinbach, and Beit-Arie began work on a general framework to enable a standardized infrastructure for open and context-sensitive linking. This led to the creation of the first draft of the OpenURL standard, which was posted publicly in April 2000 at www.sfxit.com/openurl.html, and they subsequently published an article summarizing the OpenURL standard in D-Lib Magazine. (6) In December 2000, Van de Sompel and Beit-Arie submitted the OpenURL specifications to NISO for its official standardization. The OpenURL standard was accepted as a fast track work item. (7) NISO is a nonprofit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). …