User:Helperzoom
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Contents |
[edit] To Do
- Exemplum
- Preaching Aids
- OpenURL
etc.
[edit] Sandbox
[edit] OpenURL
The OpenURL standard is a way to pass a bibliographic citation in a web link to a resource that can provide access to the cited publication or to other related resources, or otherwise make use of the citation. The typical use is to provide access to online full text of a journal article. Different users may have access via different means: e.g. students at one university need to be directed to one commercial database, while students at another (whose library has a different database subscription) need to be directed to another. OpenURL allows for context-sensitive linking, by allowing the final link to be created by a link resolver at the user's home institution.
The ad hoc standard has been in use in libraries since 2001???, and was balloted as a NISO standard in 2004.
[edit] Functionality
The specification defines the purpose of OpenURL as "to create web-transportable packages of metadata and/or identifiers about an information object". In version 0.1, the only means of transporting these packages was in the query string of a URL. Version 1.0 formalizes the concepts of ContextObject (the package of metadata) and the Transport. The ContextObject may be represented by
The ContextObject may identify the information object by a unique identifier (such as a DOI) or by descriptive metadata (e.g. journal title, ISSN, volume, year, page).
[edit] Link Resolver
The OpenURL is
In the UK, the OpenURL Router provides a central registry of OpenURL resolvers maintined by UK Higher and Further Education Institutions. Users directed to an OpenURL routed resource from their institution's IP address will be redirected to their institution's OpenURL resolver. Users directed to the OpenURL router from a browser in an arbitrary (non-UK educational) setting can still be redirected to the correct resolver if they are logged in to the Athens Authentication Service.
[edit] Current Directions
[edit] Autodiscovery
An OpenURL, to be useful, must be directed to the user's home link-resolver. Resources that provide OpenURLs must identify the user's institutional affiliation (typically by IP address) and user the pre-registered linkresolver associated with that institution. This requires institutions to register their linkresolvers with all possible sources. As the user of OpenURLs spreads, this becomes more and more difficult. For examples, OpenURLs might usefully be added to blog postings, to Wikipedia articles, etc., but the requirement for registration would be onerous. A proposed solution is the so-called latent OpenURL: one that contains all of the necessary metadata, but no target link-resolver. The latent OpenURL is "activated" by a client-side process such as a browser plug-in, which detects the OpenURL and modifies it to point to the user's institution's link-resolver. This usage may be expected to spread.
