About TC46
Technical Committee 46 (TC46) is the ISO committee responsible for standards in the area of Information and Documentation. NISO has been designated by ANSI as the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) Administrator for TC46. NISO Voting Members located in the U.S. make up the TAG membership and may participate in voting and commenting on proposed standards. NISO submits the U.S. votes and comments on standards developed by TC46 and identifies the U.S. experts for subcommittees and working groups.
Scope: Standardization of practices relating to libraries, documentation and information centres, publishing, archives, records management, museum documentation, indexing and abstracting services, and information science.
Secretariat: AFNOR; Secretary: Katell Gueguen
Chairperson: Françoise Pellé (France)
TC 46 currently has four Working Groups (WG) at the main level as well as four Subcommittees (SC).
TC46 Working Groups
Standards and projects under the direct responsibility of TC 46 Secretariat.
- WG 2, Coding of country names and related entities – This working group is responsible for the ISO 3166 series of standards, informally called Country Codes. The three-part standard is available in database format as well as in PDF and print versions. The Country Codes are managed somewhat differently from other standards. There is a Maintenance Agency (MA) that administers an international committee who makes ongoing changes and updates to the codes. The updates are published in periodic Newsletters. Approximately every five years, all the Newsletter changes are added to a revision of the standard. The 3166MA maintains a website with helpful information about the Country Code standards and the related maintenance process. Useful links related to this work include:
- ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency Website
http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes - What is ISO 3166?
http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/background_on_iso_3166/what_is_iso_3166.htm - Tasks of the ISO 3166/MA
http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/background_on_iso_3166/tasks_of_iso_3166_ma.htm - ISO 3166 FAQs
http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166-faqs.htm - FIPS 10-4 to ISO 3166 Transition Issues/Questions
http://www.niso.org/international/tc46/3166/fipstransition/ - ISO 3166/MA members
http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/background_on_iso_3166/members_of_iso_3166_ma.htm - CIA World Factbook Appendix D: cross-reference list of country data codes
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/appendix/appendix-d.html
- ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency Website
- WG 3, Conversion of written languages – This working group is responsible for various language transliteration and romanization standards.
http://www.evertype.com/standards/tc46wg3/ - WG 4, Terminology of information and documentation – This working group is currently in hiatus.
- WG 5, Archive boxes – This working group was established to develop a new standard on the construction of boxes used to store archival documents.
TC46 Published Standards
List of TC46 published standards
TC46 Subcommittees
- SC 4, Technical interoperability
- SC 8, Quality – Statistics and performance evaluation
- SC 9, Identification and description
- SC 11, Archives/records management