The Digital Library Research Group at Cornell has Reference Linking as one of its projects. Typical projects within in the group take an object-oriented approach to handling digital information. To support reference linking, therefore, we designed a scheme whereby reference linking information is extracted from archives by {\em surrogate} objects and then presented to client applications or users by means of a well-defined API. This paper describes that architecture, the API, and how the API might be supported in the Dienst protocol.