Herbert Van de Sompel is a Belgian

librarian A librarian is a person who professionally works managing information. Librarians' common activities include providing access to information, conducting research, creating and managing information systems, creating, leading, and evaluating educat ...

, computer scientist, and musician, most known for his role in the development of the

Open Archives Initiative The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives t ...

(OAI) and standards such as

OpenURL An OpenURL is similar to a web address, but instead of referring to a physical website, it refers to an article, book, patent, or other resource within a website. OpenURLs are similar to permalinks because they are permanently connected to a r ...

, Object Reuse and Exchange, and the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Career

Van de Sompel was born March 20, 1957, in

Ghent Ghent ( ; ; historically known as ''Gaunt'' in English) is a City status in Belgium, city and a Municipalities of Belgium, municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the Provinces of Belgium, province ...

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

. His PhD dissertation in 2000 developed the idea of context-sensitive and dynamic linking of scholarly information resources. In this work, he developed the "concepts underlying the OpenURL framework for open reference linking in the web-based scholarly information environment." Van de Sompel's

framework allowed for the development of software known as link resolvers which take metadata about a source and attempt to find its full text. Link resolver web services have become widely used within academic libraries. His Ph.D. dissertation and later development of the

standard led to the development and commercialization of the SFX link resolver and a series of products for libraries using this approach pioneered by Van de Sompel. In 2006 Van de Sompel was named the first recipient of the SPARC Innovator Award by the

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars and academics to make their claims about their subjects of expertise as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly pu ...

(SPARC) for starting the

(OAI) and the open reference linking framework (

). In 2017, Van de Sompel received the Paul Evan Peters Award from the

Coalition for Networked Information The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization whose mission is to promote networked information technology as a way to further the advancement of intellectual collaboration and productivity. Overview The Coalition for Networke ...

(CNI). From 2002 to the end of 2018, Van de Sompel held positions at the

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...

Research Library, including as the Lead of the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team. Notable work includes the

Memento Project Memento is a United States ''National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP)''–funded project aimed at making Web archiving, Web-archived content more readily discoverable and accessible to the public. Technical ...

, which aims to make accessing archived web content as easy as visiting current web pages. From 2019 to early 2021, he served as chief innovation officer of Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) in The Netherlands. Following his wife after her appointment to a position in

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

, he resigned at DANS while keeping professional connections to both DANS and Ghent University. Though best known for his work as a computer scientist, Van de Sompel also made music in his earlier life, including two albums, "Unploughed" and "Not a Festschrift- Geschnitzte Figuren," with his group, Young Farmers Claim Future.

References

External links

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Herbert van de Sompel: ''Dynamic and context-sensitive linking of scholarly information''. Dissertation Universiteit Gent, 2000.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Van De Sompel, Herbert Internet architecture Living people Belgian librarians 1957 births Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel