OCLC Designated Maintenance Agency for OpenURL Standard
Bethesda, MD (USA) - June 22, 2006 - OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced that OCLC will assume responsibilities as Maintenance Agency for The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services (ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004) for a period of five years. The standard defines architecture for creating a context-sensitive networked service environment.
"OpenURL has significantly improved the world's access to electronic journal content," said Mike Teets, Vice President, OCLC Global Product Architecture. "It is now progressing to bringing the same access to a much broader set of services for electronic resources. As the use of OpenURL expands and more services are automated using this critical infrastructure, there is a growing need for a registry supporting the communication and extension of the current standard as well as the development of community profiles. OCLC has committed our reliable architectures to supporting the OpenURL community and its continued success."
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 OCLC
Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) is a nonprofit organization that has provided computer-based cataloging, reference, resource sharing, eContent and preservation services to 54,000 libraries in 109 countries and territories. OCLC and its member libraries worldwide have created and maintain WorldCat, the world?s richest online resource for finding library materials. For more information, visit www.oclc.org.
About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of an information standard. NISO (www.niso.org) is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).