NISO's OpenURL Now a National Standard

Z39.88 Defines Architecture for Creating a Context-Sensitive Networked Service Environment

BETHESDA, MD - May 2, 2005 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced that The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services (NISO Z39.88-2004) has received approval as an American National Standard.
The OpenURL standard allows for the emergence of many different web-based service environments in which context is taken into account. For example, in a service environment supporting the scholarly information community, a researcher or student searching for a scholarly information resource can obtain immediate access to the most appropriate copy of that resource. "Appropriateness" reflects the user's context, such as location, cost, and contractual or license agreements in place with information suppliers. The OpenURL provides a crucial service because Web links typically do not take the user into account and, by default, take all users to the same target.

"The OpenURL standard is enjoying much wider uptake than we'd first envisioned," noted Pat Harris, NISO Executive Director. "Originally we targeted it at the electronic delivery of scholarly journal articles, but then generalized the Framework to empower communities beyond the original audience to define and deploy their own context-sensitive service environments." The standard had been in trial use since June 2003 and was most recently deployed in Google Scholar
Background on OpenURL

As the World Wide Web began its explosive growth in the early 1990s, the scholarly-information community made available digital scholarly materials consisting of metadata and full-text content. As this body of materials grew, it became increasingly difficult to provide adequate links between related information assets, distributed across many collections and controlled by different custodians. In 1999, NISO initiated an effort to improve reference linking. Herbert Van de Sompel, now with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, developed a system of context-sensitive linking, based upon a new type of URL, the OpenURL, and it provided the foundation for what has become ANSI/NISO Z39.88.

About NISO

NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. NISO Standards, information about NISO's activities and membership are featured on the NISO website http://www.niso.org.