Z39.88-2004

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Standard: NISO standard Z39.88-2004, The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services provides a means of describing a referenced resource along with a description of the context of the reference, known as a ContextObject. Additionally it defines methods of transporting these descriptions between networked systems. It is anticipated that it will be used to request services pertaining to the referenced resource and appropriate for the requester. The OpenURL Framework is very general and has the potential to be used in many application domains and by many communities. Concrete instantiations of the various core components within the framework are defined within the OpenURL Registry. There are currently two formats for ContextObject Representations defined in the OpenURL Framework: Key/Encoded-Value and XML. There are KEV and XML Community Profiles for the scholarly information community.

Version: Z39.88-2004 is also know as Version 1.0 OpenURL. The earlier 'de facto' standard scholarly information OpenURL is known as Version 0.1.

Maturity: The standard was agreed by NISO members and endorsed by ANSI in April 2005. The standards body is NISO (http://www.niso.org/)

Risk Assessment: There will be a transition period of indeterminate length while applications upgrade from version 0.1 to 1.0. It is not possible for a source service to know whether a particular resolver has upgraded. Thus it is recommended that source services provide hybrid OpenURLs that contain both version 1.0 and 0.1 keys where these differ, and that resolvers deal gracefully with keys they do not understand. The solution to various issues related to HTTP and security are given in the standard and in the Implementation Guidelines.

Z39.88 is used to implement library OpenURL Resolvers, available from several vendors, for example SFX from Ex Libris. Most major institution libraries now have an OpenURL Resolver to provide their users with access to subscribed resources from various source services such as Zetoc and Web of Knowledge.
OpenURL ContextObject is used in:
- COinS, <http://ocoins.info>
- Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core, <http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dc-citation-guidelines>
Request Transfer Message (RTM) is a proposed Z39.88 Community Profile for inter-library requests, which is currently in trial use.
KBART <http://www.uksg.org/kbart>: Knowledge Bases and Related Tools working group is developing best practices to improve metadata quality within scholarly information OpenURLs.