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June 10, 2013 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

NISO Publishes Recommended Practice on OpenURLs

Library patrons use OpenURLs to connect to the full text of research materials they find in library databases. When a patron clicks on a resource, an OpenURL is displayed that links to a link resolver knowledgebase, which then checks the OpenURL’s metadata against the link resolver. If the two match, the patron can access the resource. With some libraries receiving thousands of weekly requests for full-text content, the OpenURLs need to work and their metadata needs to be properly coded.

The NISO IOTA Working Group conducted a 3-year study analyzing the quality of millions of OpenURLs using a Completeness Index, the standard with which providers of link resolvers can monitor their OpenURLs and improve their metadata.

The IOTA Working Group noticed a pattern in OpenURL failures, says Adam Chandler, the group’s chair. “The Completeness Index was developed as a method of predicting the success of OpenURLs from a given provider by examining the data elements that provider includes in the OpenURLs from its site. This metric can serve as a tool to help determine which content providers are more likely to cause linking problems due to missing data elements in their OpenURLs and can identify exactly what the problems are.”

Source: National Information Standards Organization