Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1353/pla.2025.a964203

Publication Title

portal: Libraries and the Academy

Volume

25

Issue

3

Pages

81-91

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.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.

Original Publication Citation

de Sompel, H.V., & Nelson, M.L. (2025). The invisible influencer in information infrastructure. portal: Libraries and the Academy 25(3), 81-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2025.102327.

ORCID

0000-0003-3749-8116 (Nelson)

Download

Share

COinS