IOTA at Charleston Conference: Friday, 2:00 - 2:50 pm

FRI C1 2:00 PM – 2:50 PM NISO's IOTA Working Group: Creating an Index for Measuring the Quality of OpenURL Links

Location: Francis Marion, Parkview Room Thread: TE
Speakers: Rafal Kasprowski - Rice University; Susan Marcin - Columbia University
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/rkaspro/niso-iota-openurl-quality-index-charleston-2010

The IOTA (Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics) Working Group has been formed by NISO (National Information Standards Organization) in January 2010 to develop a community recognized index for measuring the quality of OpenURL links generated by content providers (http://www.niso.org/workrooms/openurlquality). Too often OpenURL links do not work as expected, and although the OpenURL standard was introduced a decade ago, no systematic method has been implemented to benchmark them.

The proposed system accepts OpenURLs and returns scores based on a set of evaluation metrics. These scores would allow resource providers to see precisely where their OpenURLs are weakest, letting them target metadata improvement efforts in the most cost-effective manner. A working, public reporting system with 8 million OpenURLs is already in place. IOTA's work builds on an earlier project at Cornell University funded by the Mellon Planning Grant and is supported in the KBART Phase I Recommended Practice Report.

After an overview of OpenURL linking and related problems, this presentation will discuss how IOTA's OpenURL scoring system works and explain how it can benefit the parties who rely on accurate data provided by link resolvers, i.e., content providers, subscription agents, knowledge base and link resolver developers, and libraries.

Also covered will be IOTA's interactive reporting system for analyzing submitted OpenURLs (http://openurlquality.niso.org); a wiki that documents IOTA's progress and includes a preliminary OpenURL glossary (http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/oq/); and a blog that tracks IOTA news and presentations (http://openurlquality.blogspot.com/).

The session is meant to help the wider community better understand the problems it is experiencing with OpenURL linking and to familiarize it with the OpenURL quality index, a tool designed to reduce these problems. Audience members can keep abreast of the group's progress through the wiki and blog, and participate in the development and fine-tuning of the index by submitting their OpenURLs to the reporting system.