VII · 44
Origins
OpenURL grew out of late-1990s frustration at libraries: a single hardcoded link in a database could not deliver every reader to the copy their institution actually licensed.
The appropriate-copy problem
By the late 1990s, libraries had subscribed to large numbers of overlapping electronic resources — bibliographic databases, full-text aggregators, individual publisher platforms — each operated independently and each emitting its own links. A reader on a search results page in one database might click through to an article that the database itself did not host. The link the database emitted was typically to the publisher's site, or to one specific aggregator, or to a print-only record. Whether the reader's institution had access at that link, on that day, through that particular subscription channel, was a separate question. The link the database knew about was rarely the link the reader's institution had licensed.
The literature came to call this the appropriate-copy problem: how to send a reader to the copy of an article that is appropriate for them given their institutional context, rather than to the copy the source database happens to know about.
SFX at Ghent
Herbert Van de Sompel, then at Ghent University, prototyped a solution in 1999 that he called SFX — short for "Special Effects." The idea was to separate the citation from its destination. Source databases would emit not a destination link but a structured description of the resource, sent to a per-institution server that knew which copies the institution actually licensed. The institutional server — a link resolver, in the language that emerged later — would then choose the right destination and forward the user there.
The SFX prototype was described in published work in 2000. Ex Libris commercialised the technology, and SFX became one of the first widely deployed link resolvers. The informal URL syntax used by the early SFX work is the syntax now retrospectively called OpenURL 0.1.
The path to NISO
By 2001 the original syntax had been formalised as an informal community standard, sufficient to be adopted by a number of vendors and libraries. NISO chartered a committee to develop a formal standard. The committee work generalised the original citation-centric syntax into a framework for any kind of resource, added an XML serialization alongside the URL-friendly key/value form, defined the Registry mechanism for naming formats and identifiers, and provided for Community Profiles that would let implementers constrain the framework to a workable subset.
The result, ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004 — The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services — was approved in 2004. OCLC was named the Maintenance Agency and operated the OpenURL Registry at openurl.info.
Reaffirmation
The standard was reaffirmed in 2010 — the procedural step by which NISO confirms that a standard remains current and is to continue in force without substantive change. The reaffirmation extended the standard's currency without amending any of its normative content. Z39.88-2004 (R2010) remains current at the time of writing.