OpenURL knowledge base

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "OpenURL knowledge base" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

An OpenURL knowledge base is an extensive database containing information about electronic resources such as electronic journals or ebooks and their availability and accessibility. Using the knowledge base, an OpenURL link resolver can determine if an item (article, book etc.) is available electronically and what the appropriate copy for a user is.

The knowledge base helps a library to identify the content they have access to and present it to the users for access. Vendor-maintained knowledge bases seek to offer comprehensive coverage of items that are available to a wider community. As not every institution has access to all content under their individual license agreements the knowledge bases usually offer customization tools to localize its content. Individual institutions can then modify a knowledge base to reflect their local collections, for example, which titles can be accessed electronically by their users; which website provides access to their users; and which resources are owned by the library in print format.