April 1st, 2008
This new website launched publicly over the weekend. It has been about 8 months in a development phase and even longer than that in its planning. In addition to the obvious new look, more importantly the back-end of the site has been completely overhauled. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we were able to invest in a system that provides tools that will better help NISO manage its own processes and reporting requirements, will coordinate the work of the various technical working groups, allow us to provide better document tracking, as well as improve balloting, registration and other member services.
The old NISO website included nearly 4,000 HTML, Powerpoint and PDF pages and almost 2 GB of data in a variety of formats. There was also a variety of contact, voting and member data in a ColdFusion database. Any transition of this size is bound to be difficult and cause problems. The structure of our new site is based in large part on a database structure of interlinked and dynamic pages. As such, we couldn’t simply copy and move HTML pages to the new site. Most pages needed to be recreated in the new system. We are still in the process of moving over data. Our goal was to move the most recent information first and fill in additional information as we move forward. There are also bugs that we have found and we are working with our hosting service to fix them.
Despite the challenges, we think that you will agree that the new site is easier to navigate and the information on it is more accessible. We will be organizing some webcasts later this month to provide training on how to use the system for members and committee members. These webcasts will be recorded and available on the site after the meetings, if you can’t join us. More information on these members will be distributed to the community in the coming weeks.
If you spot any problems or bugs, please email nisohq [at] niso. Thank you for your patience as we move through this transition.
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March 30th, 2008
NISO hosted a one-day seminar in Washington, DC on the theme of preserving digital information on March 14. The program was full of great presentations focused on ongoing projects and initiatives related to preservation of digital content. Preservation is an often overlooked aspect of digital content creation and management and one that will inevitably need standardization to ensure that content created today is available to future generations. The presentations are available on the agenda page of the meeting section of the NISO website.
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March 26th, 2008
Jim Neal, Chair of NISO’s Board of Directors was featured in a recent Educause podcast recorded at the fall CNI meeting. The stream of the audio is available here
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February 27th, 2008
I am sitting at the Code4Lib meeting in Portland, and I’ve just seen an amazing presentation by a programmer at (UIUC?). Taking scanned digital images of sheet music in the Pullman archive sheet music collection and using some music translation software, outputting MIDI formats, he’s output some piano music. Using the acousitc profile of a local mansion/hotel, owned by the Pullman family, he’s created an output mp3 file of the results. Not knowing how to read music, or how to play piano, he’s created a fantastic audio translation of the sheet music. Links coming soon.
Posted in music, av, preservation, applications, code4lib, meetings | No Comments »
December 18th, 2007
The Business Information Topic Committee met on Wednesday of last week to discuss their portfolio of standards and to review a number of newly proposed work items. The group has recommended that two projects be approved by the membership and will be putting those New Work Items before the membership for solicitation of voting pools. If the required 10% of members join the voting pool, the project will be launched and a Working Group will be formed to undertake the project.
Posted in meetings, Standards, Business Information, NISO | No Comments »
