Programs at ALA 2010 Annual Conference to provide more information
June 18, 2010 – Baltimore, MD - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has launched six new standard or recommended practice development projects in the past six months. There are now more development projects underway than at any time in NISO's history. Experts from interested and affected organizations have volunteered to participate on working groups to develop consensus standards or best practice recommendations for each of the six projects.
"The rapid pace of new development projects," states Todd Carpenter, NISO's Managing Director, "is an indication of both the need for standards and recommended practices in the NISO community and the community's confidence in NISO as the organization that can best bring together all the parties needed to find innovative and practical solutions."
"Many of the new projects are joint efforts with other organizations," Karen Wetzel, NISO Standards Program Manager, points out, "or are expansions on work begun by others in our community. This is a reflection of NISO's outreach in recent years to organizations working in related areas."
The six new project working groups are:
E-journal Presentation & Identification – Co-chaired by Bob Boissy (Springer) and Cindy Hepfer (University of Buffalo, SUNY), this working group will develop a NISO Recommended Practice for the presentation and identification of e-journals to improve the title listings and supporting metadata on journal websites and to particularly address the issue of titles that change names or publishers.
Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics (IOTA) – Chaired by Adam Chandler (Cornell University), this working group is investigating the feasibility of creating industry-wide, transparent, and scalable metrics for evaluating and comparing the quality of OpenURL implementations across content. It builds on work begun at Cornell University as part of a 2008/2009 Mellon Planning Grant. The results of this investigation and follow-up recommendations will be published in a NISO Technical Report.
RFID in Libraries Revision – Co-chaired by Vinod Chachra (VTLS) and Paul Sevcik (3M), this working group will produce a revision of the NISO Recommended Practice, RFID in U.S. Libraries (NISO RP 6-2008). The related ISO standard on RFID in libraries is in the final stages of development, with publication expected in late 2010. The NISO RP revision will ensure that the recommendations are up-to-date and provide U.S. implementers of RFID tags in libraries with sufficient guidance to conform to the ISO work.
Standardized Markup for Journal Articles Working Group – Co-chaired by Jeff Beck (National Library of Medicine) and B. Tommie Usdin (Mulberry Technologies), this working group will take the currently existing National Library of Medicine (NLM) Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite version 3.0, the three journal article schemas, and the documentation and shepherd it through the NISO standardization process.
NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials – Following a NISO/NFAIS roundtable meeting on the topic, a two working groups—one to focus on business issues, the other on technical issues—were launched to together develop a Recommended Practice for publisher inclusion, handling, display, and preservation of supplemental journal article materials. The business working group will be co-chaired by Linda Beebe (American Psychological Association) and Marie McVeigh (Thomson Reuters). The technical working group will be co-chaired by Dave Martinsen (American Chemical Society) and Alexander (Sasha) Schwarzman (American Geophysical Union).
NISO/UKSG Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) Phase 2 – Co-chaired by Sarah Pearson (University of Birmingham) and Andreas Biedenbach (Springer Science+Business Media), this working group takes up the outstanding items that were identified in the January 2010 recommended practice, KBART: Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (NISO RP-9-2010). The group will develop a second recommended practice focusing on the more advanced, complex issues that cause problems in utilizing OpenURL knowledge bases. The group will also deliver a centralized information portal to support educational activities.
All of the new projects will be discussed at various programs during the American Library Association 2010 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. from June 25-27. Visit the NISO @ ALA webpage (www.niso.org/news/events/2010/ala2010/) for a complete list of these programs. More information about all of the active NISO working groups can be found on the workrooms webpage (www.niso.org/workrooms/). Public interest group e-mail lists are available for most NISO working groups; visit www.niso.org/lists/ to sign-up or review the list archives.
About NISO
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org. For more information please contact NISO at (301) 654-2512 or via e-mail at nisohq@niso.org.