Extended glossary of distributed information and reference linking services

• ArXiv. The pre-eminent collection of eprint archives based at Los Alamos covering physics, mathematics and computer science. Launched in 1991 covering just high-energy physics, the archives contain over 130,000 deposited papers and are mirrored internationally at over a dozen sites.
• CogPrints. An eprint archive for cognitive sciences, modelled on the Los Alamos physics eprint archives and hosted at Southampton University.
• Computing Research Repository (CoRR): an eprint archive of papers in all areas of computer science. CoRR is one of the Los Alamos arXiv eprint archives, and is also one of the federated NCSTRL libraries.
• CookiePusher. A user interface that informs an SFX server of user context and preferences.
• CrossRef. A commercial reference linking service for journal publishers. Uses a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)-based link resolver.
• Dienst. A protocol and server for distributed document libraries. At its most basic Dienst is a protocol for communicating information, e.g. metadata, about scholarly works. A subset of Dienst is the protocol for harvesting metadata from archives complying with the technical requirements of the Open Archives initiative (OAi Dienst subset). Information is carried in the form of Web protocol (http) requests. Its largest application is the Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library (NCSTRL).
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI). An identification system for intellectual property in the digital environment. Developed by the International DOI Foundation on behalf of the publishing industry, its goals are to provide a framework for managing intellectual content, link customers with publishers, facilitate electronic commerce, and enable automated copyright management. CrossRef is an agency assigning DOIs to publishers for use in its reference linking service.
• Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). A managed environment for those in the UK higher and further education community to access quality-assured information resources on the Internet. Resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections.
• Distributed Link Service (DLS). Software supporting link placement in third-party documents that are accessible anywhere on the Web. Like link resolvers, the DLS uses database lookup to determine possible link destinations, but doesn’t need to produce an intermediate page to present links to the user. Various implementations and software components are available for different applications. Used in OpCit to support reference linking, the DLS reads PDF documents to identify references, formats the extracted reference data and compares with a pre-built database to discover locations for the referenced documents, where possible returning the results as links in the original full-text document.
• Dublin Core. A metadata element set for labelling electronic resources. The elements represent a broad, interdisciplinary consensus about the core set of elements that are likely to be widely useful to support resource discovery on the Web.
• Eprint archives. Classified and indexed storage and retrieval services for formal scholarly papers deposited by authors. The oldest and largest eprint archives cover physics and are based at Los Alamos (arXiv). Most eprint archives are subject-based and are stored on a main server and mirrored – an exact replica of the content is regularly copied – at other international sites. Some single-discipline services register content from many servers at different institutions, such as the Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library. It is anticipated that single-institution archives will develop with broad access coordinated by Open Archive services and EPrints.
• EPrints. Generalised software developed at Southampton University for managing eprint archives. It addresses the need for simple set-up of archives, within institutions and other organisations, and provides an interface for administrators, for authors to deposit papers, and for users to access papers.
• LinkBaton. A user interface to a link resolver that directs particular link types at user-specified resources. Like SFX, LinkBaton promotes personalization and localization in link services. Developed by Openly Informatics, Inc., it directs links to universal services such as online booksellers or stock ticker services. It is planned to offer journal reference links via chosen services.
• Link resolvers. Two issues in resolving links to destination documents on the Web are: stability of the documents’ location, and multiple versions. Link resolvers can help with one or both of these problems. Link resolvers can also control access. Instead of containing a direct URL, a Web link can send a request to a resolver, which might return a document or offer a selection of documents. For examples of resolvers for scholarly reference linking see the CrossRef -- DOI -- OpenURL -- SFX link resolver demo.
• Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library (NCSTRL). A federated collection of technical report report libraries maintained by different university computer science departments. Like a specialised eprint archive, the reports are freely accessible to readers via the Web. Coordinating services – central indexing and communications between servers - are managed using Dienst.
• Open Archives initiative (OAi). Initially a forum to solve interoperability between author self-archiving solutions (eprint archives), now extended to support a wider range of digital resources of academic and scholarly interest. Besides eprints and electronic texts, such resources include science and social science data sets, visual materials, archival collections, geographic information system data, sound and music, and video. Interoperability hinges on a fundamental distinction between the archive-functions, which include data-collection and maintenance, and end-user functions. In this approach, there are data providers and service providers. Data providers (such as individual eprint archives) support a simple harvesting protocol and provide extracts of metadata in a common, minimal-level format in response to requests from service providers. Service providers use extracted metadata to build higher level, user-oriented services, such as catalogues and portals to materials distributed across multiple eprint sites. The approach and its protocols were documented in the "Santa Fe convention”.
• OpenURL. A URL that transports metadata, or keys to access metadata, for a digital document or object for which the OpenURL is provided. A compliant resolver can read the OpenURL. Services that plan to generate and output OpenURLs include arXiv, CrossRef, ISI and the Open Citation project. There have been preliminary discussions about developing OpenURL as an ANSI international standard.
• ResearchIndex. Software designed for ‘autonomous citation indexing’, in effect builds an ISI-like index of the online full-text scientific literature. Developed at NEC Princeton, it has been used to search and index computer science papers on the Web.
• Santa Fe convention. Document specifying the technical requirements for implementing Open Archives. Soon to be revised and renamed the Open Archives Harvesting Framework Specifications.
• SFX. A link resolver and server designed to provide users of a given university or institutional library with access to local resources and to networked subscription and non-subscription-based services. Promotes the concept of ‘localization’ in reference linking. By receiving information on who or where a user is, the user’s ‘context’, it is argued that the resolver can offer the most appropriate resources. In particular, the service can identify users that are authorised to access commercial services, e.g. journals licensed to a given site. Developed at Ghent University in Belgium, SFX is being commercialised by ExLibris.
• SlinkS. The Scholarly Link Specification framework facilitates inter-publisher reference linking by providing a syntax and vocabulary for exchanging information. Services such as LinkBaton use this framework.
• SPIRES. Stanford Public Information REtrieval System A collection of library databases covering high-energy physics including journals and eprint archives. Hosted by the library of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).