SFX  History (from Swami)

• 1997/98 – SFX linking research work began at Ghent University, Belgium, conducted by Herbert Van de Sompel in collaboration with Ex Libris and SilverPlatter as partners
• Feb  2000 – Ex Libris acquires SFX link server technology from Ghent
• Nov 2000 – SFX-URL submitted to NISO for standardization (the name was later changed to OpenURL)

· May 2000 – First SFX sites in live production

· Apr  2001 - SFX first went live at Caltech (USA)

· Mar  2001 - Van de Sompel, Herbert and Oren Beit-Arie. March, 2001. "Open Linking in the Scholarly Information Environment Using the OpenURL Framework." D-Lib Magazine. v7(3).  

• Jul    2001 - Van de Sompel, Herbert and Oren Beit-Arie. July/August, 2001. "Generalizing the OpenURL Framework beyond References to Scholarly Works." D-Lib Magazine. v7(7/8).
• Jul    2002 – Active international user group formed (SMUG)
• Apr  2003 – OpenURL v1.0 released to trial use
• May 2003 – 10+ commercial link server solutions; other local solutions
• Feb  2005 – v3 released