Talk:OpenURL

Untitled

Whew, that's a dense description of whatever it is that an OpenURL is. I've read it a few times and though I have some ideas of what an OpenURL might be I'm not sure if any of them are close to correct:

Perhaps someone can give me some guidance and/or some examples.

OpenURL

Used in libraries?

Used by libraries to direct people to appropriate resources?

How about this? A library posts a story, say an article about a local election, on the library's website. The link from this story says," Click here for a list of articles about this election" and that link contains a code that references the local election and goes to the library's link resolver which returns a collection of stuff--various materials--the library has identified as relevant to the election. Is that close?

--TMH 22:54, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Typical scenario is a person searches a database which indexes journal articles and identifies an article they want to read. Since the database contains only an index, the full text of the article is not present here (the "source" database). They click on a link (an OpenURL) which takes them to their library's link resolver. All going well, the resolver presents links to copies of the full text of the article in one or more "target" databases. Nurg 08:43, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

More to the point (yes, still smarting about the removal of my illustration): they're used by link creators to write library-independent hyperlinks to content, something content providers want and libraries can leverage. This happens because OpenURL uncouples *what's* being linked to from the other context of the link. The referent parameters in the query tell you the author and title, or the ISBN; but the base URL, or the requester or resolver parameters, tell you what library to look the reference up in. So answering TMH:

• An author posts a story about the election to wikipedia. Or: an author posts an article in an electronic journal.
• The author includes a link to a journal article available by subscription only. So they can't put in all possible hyperlinks for all the subscribing libraries in the world.
• The author (or whoever's putting their content online) writes the link as an OpenURL.
• The individual reader (through a browser plugin) or library (through preprocessing) adds to the OpenURL information which steers resolution to the library's holdings.

So it's used by authors (content providers) to direct readers to their local (= appropriate) copy of a resource, in their library; and it's smiled on by libraries because it increases the value of their electronic subscriptions (they can hyperlink each other without much pain). OpenURL can be used for a lot more, but that's stil the major use. Opoudjis 16:03, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

In my quest to define OpenURL in an understandable form I have identified four sources from which I shall attempt to write an understandable definition:

Here's what the OCLC has to say about OpenURLs:

Q. What is OpenURL?

A. Remember the card catalog? Everything in a library was represented in the card catalog with one or more cards carrying bibliographic information. OpenURL is the internet equivalent of those index cards. An OpenURL packages bibliographic information into a form that internet services can easily understand. When a user clicks on an OpenURL link, the bibliographic information it contains is sent to a library internet service. The results of that click will vary depending on the library it is sent to- just as a user in a bricks-and-mortar library will be sent to different place to retrieve the item corresponding to the card in the catalog.

Some other good sources for a definition of OpenURL

from Ex Libris Group developer of software solutions for libraries and information centers.

from the OpenURL Committee of the National Information Standards Organization (is that the proper way to refer to this committee?)

From a division of Proquest that provides OpenURL products.

--TMH 06:35, 5 April 2007 (UTC)