Development of OpenURL Quality Metrics

The OpenURL standard is a widely deployed technology to facilitate linking to resources across the library supply chain. The OpenURL formatted URL carries the data about an item to the link resolver of the library. The resolver compares the metadata embedded within the OpenURL with what is held in the library's collection and presents the available options in a results page. For a book, there is usually a link to the library's catalog card; for an article, ideally this is a link directly to the full-text of the article. At a typical academic library thousands of OpenURL requests are initiated by patrons each week. The problem is, too often these links do not work as expected, leaving patrons frustrated by a lower than desired quality of service. I am investigating the feasibility of creating industry wide metrics for evaluating and comparing the quality of OpenURL implementations across vendors.

• Objective: Distinguish between excellent OpenURLs and poor OpenURLs across content providers. Improve quality through quarterly measurement.
• Method: Get large number of OpenURLs from OpenURL resolver vendors. Parse each OpenURL and compare the contents of the element to various regular expression matching rules. Focus attention on the elements that are required most frequently by content providers when linking to the text. Create metrics every quarter. Compare over time for change and improvement over time.
• Results: So far encuraging. Check out the demo: http://openurlquality.niso.org
• Conclusions: Investigation ongoing.

Blog: <http://openurlquality.blogspot.com/>