NISO's IOTA Working Group: Creating an Index for Measuring the Quality of OpenURL Links
Rafal Kasprowski, Susan Marcin · 2012
The IOTA (Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics) working group has been formed by NISO (National Information Standards Organization) in 2010 to develop a community-recognized index for measuring the quality of OpenURL links generated by content providers.OpenURL links do not work as expected all too frequently, and although the OpenURL standard was introduced a decade ago, no systematic method has been implemented to benchmark the resulting links.This paper's objective is to help users better understand what causes OpenURLs to fail and to familiarize them with the OpenURL quality index, a scoring system in development meant to help improve OpenURL linking by measuring the quality of citation source OpenURLs.After an overview of OpenURL and related linking problems, IOTA's work on the OpenURL quality index is discussed in detail.An OpenURL analysis tool is already available for use.It generates reports that compare OpenURLs across databases and vendors, which can help OpenURL providers improve their links.Community members may follow IOTA's progress on the group's web sites and support the initiative by contributing their OpenURL log files.