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NISO News

NISO E-book Annotation Sharing Workshops Identify Need for Cross-Platform Interoperability and Standardization (April 16, 2012)
The National Information Standards Organization has published the final report on the Standards Development Workshops on E-Book Annotation Sharing and Social Reading, a project funded by a $48,500 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of this project was to organize two meetings to discuss the current state of annotation of digital books and sharing those annotations on a variety of platforms. The first of the two meetings was held in Frankfurt, Germany, prior to the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the second was held in San Francisco, California, prior to the start of the Books In Browsers Meeting hosted by the Internet Archive. Both meetings were held in October 2011 on the 10th and 26th respectively. Among the outcomes for the meetings was an increased awareness of the need for a standard for locating reference points in digital texts as well as a structure for sharing those annotations across reading systems. The most significant outcome of this initiative is the launch of a new standards working group within NISO to formulate the syntax for locating an annotation reference point and a structure for sharing annotations between diverse reading systems.
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NISO Publishes Revised Recommended Practice for RFID in U.S. Libraries (April 3, 2012)
The National Information Standards Organization announces the availability of RFID in U.S. Libraries (NISO RP-6-2012), a revision of the 2008 Recommended Practice that provides a set of practices and procedures to ensure interoperability among U.S. RFID implementations in libraries. By following these recommendations, libraries can ensure that an RFID tag in one library can be used seamlessly by another, assuming both comply, even if they have different suppliers for tags, hardware, and software.
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NISO 2012 Educational Programs Run the Gamut from Metadata to Embracing the Clouds (March 21, 2012)
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) continues its robust offering of educational programs in 2012 with 14 webinars, three forums, 10 teleconferences, and a series of four joint webinars with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). Webinar program topics cover a wide variety of standards and technology areas of interest to the library, publishing, and scholarly information communities including: metadata, e-books, linked data, usage statistics, discovery innovations, metrics for scholarship, e-resource platforms, and library cloud implementations. For the third year, NISO and the DCMI will hold a series of joint webinars, with 2012's focus on various aspects of linked data including library cataloging metadata, webpage microdata, scientific research data, and RDFa. NISO's in-person forums will address managing and citing research data and the e-book renaissance, in addition to the 6th annual joint forum with the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) on The Changing Standards Landscape, held in conjunction with the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim. Rounding out the 2012 program are free open teleconferences providing updates on NISO standards development and offering the community an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback.
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NISO Publishes White Paper on the Future Standardization Needs for Electronic Resource Management Systems (February 1, 2012)
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of Making Good on the Promise of ERM: A Standards and Best Practices Discussion Paper. This publication is the outcome of the NISO Electronic Resource Management (ERM) Data Standards and Best Practices Project, a successor to the Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI). The project's primary goals were to perform a "gap analysis" of standards and best practices and make recommendations on the future of the ERMI Data Dictionary.
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NISO and NFAIS Issue Draft for Public Comment of Recommended Practice on Supplemental Materials for Journal Articles (January 31, 2012)
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have issued a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part A: Business Policies and Practices (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment ending on February 29, 2012. Although supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, there is no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, or preservation of these materials. To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored a working group to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would solve related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators. The Supplemental Materials project has two groups working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. The draft currently available for comment includes the recommendations from the Business Working Group. [Read the full press release]

NISO Publishes New Recommended Practice on Physical Delivery of Library Resources (January 19, 2012)
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of the new recommended practice: Physical Delivery of Library Resources (NISO RP-12-2012). The physical delivery of library materials is an integral component of the library resource sharing process. Despite the ever-increasing availability of electronic journals, e-books, and other digital resources, the movement of physical items remains a major concern and a major cost for many libraries. In one state, borrowing of returnable items increased by 107.4% in six years. A recent study showed that the average academic library spends more than $6,800/year for delivery services, with some libraries paying as high as $60,000. Given such volumes, libraries are struggling to deal with the labor and equipment costs, material wear and tear, and transit and sorting needs. [Read the full press release]

NISO Releases Updated Draft of SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding for Public Comment (January 5, 2012)
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the availability of a draft update of SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding for public comment (NISO RP-7-201X) through February 19, 2012. SERU offers publishers and libraries the opportunity to save both the time and the costs associated with a negotiated and signed license agreement for e-resources by both content provider and customer agreeing to operate within a framework of shared understanding and good faith. The SERU framework provides a set of common understandings for parties to reference as an alternative to a formal license when conducting business. [Read the full press release]

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