 Link resolver web services have become widely used within academic libraries.His Ph.D dissertation and later development of the OpenURL 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 (SPARC) for starting the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the open reference linking framework (OpenURL).