The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) aims at defining standards and/or best practices for the new generation of library discovery services that are based on indexed search. These discovery services are primarily based upon indexes derived from journals, ebooks and other electronic information of a scholarly nature. The content comes from a range of information providers and products–commercial, open access, institutional, etc.
Given the growing interest and activity in the interactions between information providers and discovery services, a more standard set of practices is required for the ways that content is represented in discovery services and for the interactions between the creators of these services and the information providers whose resources they represent.
Content providers, discovery service providers, and libraries are encouraged to take specific measures to assert their conformance with the recommended practice of NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative. These measures are voluntarily made by each organization, in an effort to increase transparency and communications around pre-indexed or “web-scale” library discovery services. The ODI Conformance Checklists enable standardized methods for content providers, discovery service providers, and libraries to assert their ODI conformance to each other.