Librarians are trying to keep up with the ever-growing body of electronic resources, in both metadata and full-text formats. They need to manage the availability of these expensive resources, across the multitude of individual databases and consolidators.

Most systems fail to take into account the user context, i.e. the electronic resources that are accessible to individual users. Letting users easily link to electronic resources they already have access to is important.

Having discovered a resource, how will the user access the most appropriate copy, given user and institutional preferences, access rights, cost, etc.?

Many solutions fail to offer any local control over what links are presented to users and how such links are resolved. Allowing institutions to control the linking services for their individual users is a great benefit.

1. An electronic resource introduces the OpenURL link.
2. The user clicks the OpenURL and is directed to the OpenURL Resolver of the user’s choice.
3. Via the OpenURL, the metadata is transported from the electronic resource to the user’s OpenURL Resolver.
4. The user’s OpenURL Resolver presents links for resource they have access to.
5. The user clicks the link to the resource.

By implementing OpenURL, electronic resource providers can integrate their electronic resources into the overall information services. By creating hooks that link back to the institution's OpenURL Resolver electronic resource providers can allow institutions to add customized linking based on the institution's local resources and on the electronic resources they already pay for.

The OpenURL provides two mechanism for encoding a citation of an electronic resource into an URL.(Key Encoded Value and XML)

The metadata is provided by using a global identifier for the resource, for example a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), or by encoding metadata about the resource, for example title, author, journal title, etc., or by some combination of both approaches.

OpenURL is an actionable URL that uses HTTP or HTTPS to transports metadata, or keys to access metadata. The target of the OpenURL is an OpenURL resolver that offers context-sensitive services based on that metadata.

An OpenURL is comprised of two parts, a BASEURL and a QUERY. The BASEURL identifies the OpenURL resolver that is specific to the user, usually the one offered by the institution to which the user belongs. The QUERY part can be made up of one or more ContextObjects.

In this example the BASEURL is http://www.clrc.org/OpenURL/resolver.htm, the URL of CLRC's demo OpenURL resolver. The rest of the OpenURL is the QUERY.

The OpenURL Resolver software extracts metadata out of the OpenURL. The metadata is used in conjunction with the user context and with the institution-defined resources to create URLs for other resources. This creates the "just in time" links on the web page.

The user selects one of the links listed in the OpenURL Resolver output and a new window is opened and directed to the chosen electronic resource.