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Registry Deprecation

In 2022 OCLC stated that the OpenURL Registry it had run since 2006 was no longer supported or maintained. A frozen copy remains online. The standard itself is unchanged.

What happened

Z39.88-2004 relies on a Registry for the identifiers of formats, namespaces, transports, encodings and Community Profiles. In June 2006 NISO designated OCLC as the maintenance and registration agency, and OCLC Research operated the Registry at openurl.info. Several entries were added after the standard was published: the Dublin Core Community Profile, the Request Transfer Message profiles, the Canonical Citation profile (2011), and XML formats such as MODS and ONIX.

In 2022 OCLC updated its Registry page to say that the Registry was no longer supported or maintained. OCLC Research's OpenURL project page now states that "this experimental research project has concluded". A read-only snapshot of the Registry is published by OCLC Research on GitHub Pages as OpenURL-Frozen, described as "the Frozen (deprecated) version of the Registry for the OpenURL Framework"; web archives show openurl.info redirecting there from early 2022. A companion infoURI-Frozen snapshot preserves the info-URI namespace registrations such as info:sid and info:arxiv.

What this changes for implementers

  • Registered identifiers such as info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal remain valid and in daily use.
  • No new formats, namespaces or profiles can be registered through OCLC.
  • The matrices and XML Schemas that used to be fetched from openurl.info URLs are available from the frozen copy. Software that fetches them at runtime should keep a local copy instead.
  • The standard's text is unchanged. ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004 (R2010) remains a current NISO standard.

For people building or maintaining resolvers, databases or citation tools, little changes: the URIs they use still mean what they always meant.

What was registered

The frozen Registry holds more than the four bibliographic formats: KEV formats for scholarly ServiceTypes, Dublin Core and canonical citations; draft formats for maps, scores, sound, visual materials and computer resources; XML formats including MARCXML, MODS, ONIX and ISO 20775 holdings; and the SAP1, SAP2, Dublin Core, Canonical Citation and Request Transfer Message profiles. See The OpenURL Registry.

Sources