NISO's IOTA Initiative: Measuring the Quality of OpenURL Links

Abstract

The Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics (IOTA) initiative was formed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 2010 to continue a Mellon-funded project on OpenURL quality begun at Cornell University. IOTA's objective is to develop a scoring system for measuring the quality of OpenURL links generated by content providers at the citation level. OpenURLs have a history of failing to resolve correctly, but no method has been devised to benchmark them even a decade after the introduction of the underlying standard. The proposed system would generate scores based on specific evaluation metrics and thus rate providers' OpenURL quality. The system's analytical approach would also enable OpenURL providers to pinpoint linking problems and thus optimize OpenURL improvements. A public OpenURL analysis tool, which relies on link data contributed by OpenURL providers and libraries, is currently in use. Recently, IOTA approached the Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (KBART) initiative about a possible collaboration on a related project, which would investigate OpenURL linking not at the citation level, but the full-text level.

Keywords:

• full-text linking
• IOTA
• KBART
• link resolvers
• OpenURL quality
• OpenURL reports

Notes

1. Rafal Kasprowski and Susan Marcin, “NISO's IOTA Working Group: Creating an Index for Measuring the Quality of OpenURL Links,” Charleston Conference Proceedings 2010, preprint.

2. James Culling, “Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain: Final Project Report for UKSG,” http://www.uksg.org/sites/uksg.org/files/uksg_link_resolvers_final_report.pdf (accessed November 18, 2011).

3. Thomas R. Bruce and Diane I. Hillmann, “The Continuum of Metadata Quality: Defining, Expressing, Exploiting,” in Metadata in Practice, ed. Diane I. Hillmann and Elaine L. Westbrooks (Chicago: American Library Association, 2004), 238–256.

4. Baden Hughes, “Metadata Quality Evaluation: Experience from the Open Language Archives Community,” in Digital Libraries: International Collaboration and Cross-Fertilization, ed. Zhaoneng Chen et al. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2004), 320–329.

5. Adam Chandler, “Results of L'Année philologique online OpenURL Quality Investigation: Mellon Planning Grant Final Report,” http://hdl.handle.net/1813/23171 (accessed November 18, 2011).

6. National Information Standards Organization, “IOTA: Improving OpenURL Quality through Analytics,” http://www.niso.org/workrooms/openurlquality (accessed November 18, 2011). For more information, see also IOTA's project site: http://openurlquality.niso.org/ (accessed November 18, 2011).

7. Kasprowski and Marcin, “NISO's IOTA Working Group.”

8. IOTA Working Group, “Select Report Type,” http://openurlquality.niso.org/select.php (accessed November 18, 2011).

9. Adam Chandler, Glen Wiley, and Jim LeBlanc, unpublished data.

10. NISO/UKSG KBART Working Group, “KBART Phase I Recommended Practice Report,” http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-2010-09.pdf (accessed November 18, 2011).