The Invisible Influencer in Information Infrastructure

abstract: The UPS Prototype was a proof-of-concept web portal built in preparation for the Universal Preprint Service Meeting held in October 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The portal provided search functionality for a set of metadata records that had been aggregated from a range of repositories that hosted preprints, working papers, and technical reports. Every search result was overlaid with a dynamically generated menu, called an SFX-menu, that provided a selection of value-adding links for the described scholarly work. The meeting eventually led to the Open Archives Initiative and its Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which remains widely used in scholarly communication, cultural heritage, and elsewhere. The SFX-menu approach became standardized as the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services (NISO OpenURL), and compliant linking servers remain operational in academic and research libraries worldwide. Both OAI-PMH and NISO OpenURL, as well as associated systems and services, have been so widely deployed that they can be considered an integral part of the scholarly information infrastructure. The authors, who were deeply involved in devising the UPS Prototype and played core roles in the OAI-PMH and NISO OpenURL specification efforts, take the reader behind the scenes of the development of these technologies. They reveal Clifford Lynch as an invisible influencer in the establishment of scholarly information infrastructure.