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Group Name	Group Description
AVIAC (Automation Vendors Information Advisory Committee)
Business Information Topic Committee	The NISO Business Information Committee was formed in early 2007 in response to a strategic restructuring. As part of NISO's organizational structure, topic committees that bring together leaders in specific subjects have been created to provide direction to the organization for standards development in those umbrella topic areas. The Business Information Topic Committee focuses on issues regarding the management structure surrounding the acquisition, licensing, purchasing, and analysis of information. Specific areas include: license expression, online usage data, access management, performance measures and other statistics, etc. The topic committee is charged with the following tasks: Track standards development within NISO and in other standards organizations related to the topic. Identify where new standards may provide solutions in their specific area. Convene Thought Leader meetings to incubate new standards activities. Create and provide guidance and oversight to standards working groups under their purview. Manage the five-year reaffirmation process for approved standards. Standards Portfolio The following NISO standards fall under the Business Information Topic Committee. In development: License Expression SERU - Shared E-Resources Understanding SUSHI - Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative Existing standards: ANSI/NISO Z39.7-2004 Information Services and Use: Metrics & statistics for libraries and information providers--Data Dictionary ANSI/NISO Z39.20-1999 Criteria for Price Indexes for Print Library Materials
Content and Collection Management Topic Committee	The NISO Content and Collection Management Committee was formed in early 2007 in response to a strategic restructuring. As part of NISO's organizational structure, topic committees that bring together leaders in specific subjects have been created to provide direction to the organization for standards development in those umbrella topic areas. The Content and Collection Management Topic Committee focuses on issues regarding developing, describing, providing access to, and maintaining content items and collections. Specific topics include: Dublin Core, library binding, SAN, RFID, etc. The topic committee is charged with the following tasks: Track standards development within NISO and in other standards organizations related to the topic. Identify where new standards may provide solutions in their specific area. Convene Thought Leader meetings to incubate new standards activities. Create and provide guidance and oversight to standards working groups under their purview. Manage the five-year reaffirmation process for approved standards.
Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee	The NISO Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee was formed in early 2007 in response to a strategic restructuring. As part of NISO's organizational structure, topic committees that bring together leaders in specific subjects have been created to provide direction to the organization for standards development in those umbrella topic areas. The Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee focuses on issues regarding the finding and distribution of information by and to users, including OpenURL, Metasearch, interface design, web services, etc. The topic committee is charged with the following tasks: Track standards development within NISO and in other standards organizations related to the topic. Identify where new standards may provide solutions in their specific area. Convene Thought Leader meetings to incubate new standards activities. Create and provide guidance and oversight to standards working groups under their purview. Manage the five-year reaffirmation process for approved standards.
Education Committee	The NISO Education Committee was first formed in early 2007 in response to a strategic restructuring. In order to respond to its broad constituency and their diverse needs, NISO needs to provide wide-ranging and robust education and training sessions. In addition to bringing in outside expertise and perspective, an education committee formed of individuals from diverse communities allows NISO to separate the content development—the main focus of this group—from the organizational and budgetary aspects of planning education programs and meetings. The Education Committee will be responsible for determining the topical focus of educational programs, setting an agenda, and recruiting speakers. In addition, the Committee will identify other opportunities for NISO to educate and inform the information communities about its work.
Framework of Guidance for Good Digital Collections	NISO, with the generous support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has now completed the third edition of A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. The Framework establishes principles for creating, managing, and preserving digital collections, digital objects, metadata, and projects. It also provides links to relevant standards that support the principles and additional resources. The Framework was initially developed in 2000 (1st edition) and revised in 2004 (2nd edition). The 3rd edition (December 2007) updates and revises the Framework in order to incorporate it into a website for use by library and museum practitioners. The PDF is now available. In addition, a new web platform is being developed for the Framework that will encourage community participation in the document, soliciting feedback, annotations, resources, and discussion.
Institutional Identifiers
JAV (Journal Article Versions) Working Group	In September 2005 NISO launched a partnership with the ALPSP (the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) in the UK that will bring together experts from the publishing, library, library systems and user communities to examine the problems associated with the proliferation of different versions of journal articles. What is the problem? In the digital world, multiple versions of journal articles are often available online. This can cause confusion because there is no established way of identifying the various versions by either a common terminology or identification scheme. Versions of a journal differ in minor or major respects and 'preprints' and 'postprints' come in many variants. Sally Morris has provided an excellent overview of the problem in a recent paper. Scope of Work The work plan will include: Creation of use cases to identify the most common journal article life cycles. Analysis of use cases to determine common life cycle stages. Selection of preferred vocabulary for the most common life cycle stages. Development of appropriate metadata to identify each variant version and its relationship to other versions, in particular the definitive, fully functional published version. Establishment of practical systems for ensuring that the metadata is applied by authors or repository managers and publishers.
Knowledge Base and Related Tools
License Expression Working Group	The National Information Standards Organization, Digital Library Federation (DLF), EDItEUR, and Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) have agreed to form a License Expression Working Group to develop a single standard for the exchange of license information between publishers and libraries. The DLF has supported ground-breaking work in this area through its Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) and EDItEUR has used the ERMI requirements as the foundation of its work in developing its ONIX for Licensing proof of concept model. NISO's May 2005 Digital Rights Expression Workshop identified the need to coordinate and consolidate standards efforts in digital licensing rights expression. The working group, co-chaired by Nathan Robertson (University of Maryland Law Library) and Alicia Wise (Publishers Licensing Society, UK), has as its initial charge to: 1. Monitor and make recommendations regarding the further development of standards relating to electronic resources and license expression, including but not limited to the ERMI and EDItEUR work. 2. Actively engage in the development of the ONIX license messaging specification. The technical working group will develop the recommendations based on review and comments. A review group will monitor work in progress and provide feedback to the technical group.
MetaSearch Initiative	Metasearch, parallel search, federated search, broadcast search, cross-database search, search portal are a familiar part of the information community's vocabulary. They speak to the need for search and retrieval to span multiple databases, sources, platforms, protocols, and vendors at one time. Metasearch services rely on a variety of approaches to search and retrieval including open standards (such as NISO's Z39.50), proprietary API's, and screen scraping. However, the absence of widely supported standards, best practices, and tools makes the metasearch environment less efficient for the system provider, the content provider, and ultimately the end-user. To move toward industry solutions NISO sponsored a Metasearch Initiative to enable: metasearch service providers to offer more effective and responsive services content providers to deliver enhanced content and protect their intellectual property libraries to deliver services that distinguish their services from Google and other free web services. The groundwork for NISO's Metasearch Initiative was laid in two important events: A 2-day Strategy Meeting in May 2003 defined the metasearch state-of-the-art and built consensus on ways to move forward; and A Metasearch workshop in October 2003 informed librarians, content providers, aggregators about metasearch. The reports and presentations at these two events give important background on vendor services and user needs.
Metasearch Initiative - TG1 - Access Management	The Access Management Task Group was charged with gathering requirements for Metasearch authentication and access needs, inventorying existing processes now in place, and developing a series of formal use cases describing the needs. Specific deliverables include: A definitions document of Access Management and Metasearch terms Defined distinctions in Access Management between user access and agent access Understanding basic requirements of constituents An inventory of methods and techniques in use today Use cases describing authentication and access needs Defined statistics that must be kept to satisfy access management systems
Metasearch Initiative - TG2 - Collection Description	Content providers (publishers, database providers) must be able to communicate information about the collections they offer in a uniform way. Task Group 2 on Collection Description is working with other organizations examining this problem to produce: A list of data elements needed to describe a collection; A document containing guidelines for maintaining and exchanging collection information; Recommendations on further steps needed, including development of best practices, implementation guidelines and formal standards.
Metasearch Initiative -TG3 - Search/Retrieve	The interdependent nature of search-retrieval protocols and techniques demands that the investigation of one be done in the context of the other. Task Group 3 will investigate and report on several related aspects of search and retrieval to produce a series of documents including: A description of the current practice in Metasearching search and retrieval Defining a standard vocabulary and terms Defining a template for exchange of search and retrieval functionality Inventorying proprietary XML interfaces and best practices for Metasearch search and retrieval Recommend the data elements to describe a Result Set and a record within a Result Set Review SRW/SRU and recommend modifications for use as the basis of a Metasearch search and retrieval standard.
RFID for Library Applications	The committee is charged with the following deliverables: - Develop a set of guidelines that lay out current best practices for the use of RFID in library applications. - Prepare an input document that outlines US practices and concerns to an ISO TC46 working group on an RFID data model for library applications. - Serve as a sounding board for the NISO representative to the ISO TC 46 working group. Continue to work with ALA/BISG working group around the interaction of technology and privacy issues.
SERU (Shared Electronic Resource Understanding)	The Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Working Group is charged with developing Recommended Practices to be used to support a new mechanism for publishers to sell e-resources without licenses if they feel their perception of risk has been adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of behavior. The document will be an expression of a set of shared understandings of publisher and library expectations regarding the sale of an electronic resource subscription. Negotiation between publisher perspectives and library perspectives will be needed to develop a useful set of practices. The working group will build on considerable work to identify key elements of a best practices document already begun during a one-day meeting sponsored by ARL, ALPSP, SSP, and SPARC. All of the participants in that scoping meeting expressed a strong desire to continue to work on this project and form the proposed working group to develop best practices.
SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative)	Libraries engaged in managing usage statistics for online content face both challenges and opportunities. Challenges: Usage statistics are widely available from online content providers and Project COUNTER has provided useful guidelines for counting and reporting usage. Unfortunately, the statistics are not yet available in a consistent data container and the administrative cost of individual provider-by-provider downloads is high. Opportunities: The emergence of Electronic Resource Management Systems with the capability of storing usage statistics has accelerated the demand from libraries to acquire usage statistics. A number of non-ERMS vendors are also interested in developing business models for the consolidation of statistics for library customers. All of the interested parties are seeking a standard model for machine to machine automation of statistics harvesting. A cross-industry group of solution-seekers has emerged to apply their skills to building this model. Participants from libraries, ILS vendors and online content providers have collaborated on developing a model that includes an automated request and response for usage statistics. The request and response mechanisms have been designed within a web services model. To read the SUSHI abstract or download a copy of the standard, click here. For information on SUSHI schemas, please visit http://www.niso.org/schemas/sushi/. To view registry information, press coverage, FAQ information, and other reference material, visit http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi.
SUSHI (Z39.93) Standing Committee
Z39.7 Standing Committee
Z39.85 Maintenance Agency Advisory Group (Dublin Core)