VII · 45

Registry Deprecation

In 2022 OCLC announced that the OpenURL Registry at openurl.info, which it had operated as Maintenance Agency since 2004, was deprecated. The standard itself is unchanged.

What happened

OCLC served as the Maintenance Agency for ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004 from the standard's approval in 2004. As Maintenance Agency, OCLC operated the OpenURL Registry — the body of registered formats, namespaces, identifiers, transports, encodings, and Community Profiles — at the host openurl.info. In 2022, OCLC announced that the Registry had been treated as a research prototype, that the prototype was being deprecated, and that openurl.info would be taken down.

The openurl.info host now returns either a redirect or a static, archived copy of the Registry pages, depending on the path. No new registrations are being processed.

What this changes for implementers

The deprecation affects the Registry as an institution, not the framework defined by Z39.88-2004. Concretely:

  • The format identifiers themselves — info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal and the rest — remain valid and remain in production use. Resolvers and emitters continue to use them.
  • The four registered metadata formats (journal, book, dissertation, patent) and the two Community Profiles (SAP1, SAP2) remain the only registered items. No further registrations are expected.
  • The XSDs for the XML formats, which were once accessible at openurl.info URLs, are now available only through archived copies or third-party mirrors.
  • The standard's text is unchanged. Z39.88-2004 (R2010) remains the current NISO standard.

For most working implementers — those building or maintaining link resolvers, those emitting OpenURLs from databases, those writing citation tools — the change is invisible. The URIs they have been using continue to mean what they have always meant.

Implications

  • The framework is, in practice, frozen at its initial Registry content. Any community wishing to register a new metadata format would now have no formal Maintenance Agency through which to do so.
  • Tools that resolved info:ofi/ URIs by HTTP-fetching them from openurl.info need to use a static mapping instead.
  • References to openurl.info in older documentation may now return only archived content.

The deprecation is widely read as confirmation of the framework's status as a stable, mature, slowly evolving standard whose vocabulary is complete enough for the resource types it covers.

Sources