August Webinar: E-Books: A Rapidly Evolving Marketplace

NISO's August webinar will be held on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time) on the topic of E-Books: A Rapidly Evolving Marketplace.

While e-books have been slow to garner wide adoption, the past few years have seen greatly expanded interest and use of e-books. New models and applications are growing exponentially. Building on the free NISO/BISG forum held at the American Library Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, this webinar will focus on the business applications of creating, selling, and using e-books.

Topics and speakers are:

• Creation, Formatting, and Distribution Options for E-books – Tino Fleischer, Atypon Systems, Inc.

• Business Models and Approaches for Selling E-books – Anne Orens, Independent Consultant

• E-books in the Library: Successfully Reaching the End User – Sue Polanka, Head, Reference and Instruction, and Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, Wright State University

For more information and to register, visit the event webpage. Registration is per site (access for one computer) and includes access to the online recorded archive of the webinar. NISO and NASIG members receive a discounted member rate. A student discount is also available. Can't make it on the 12th? Register and gain access to the recorded archive for one year.

This webinar is sponsored by Swets.

September Two-Part Webinar: E-Resources Licensing: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Not many librarians are also lawyers, but they often need to have an understanding of legal issues to succeed in their jobs. Licensing, contract, and copyright law all have significant impacts on our community. NISO's September two-part webinar, E-Resources Licensing: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, to be held on September 9 and 16 from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. (Eastern time), is your solution to the dilemma.

Part I of the webinar will provide an introduction to the basics of a license agreement as a legal contract. Participants will learn about basic legal terminology common to most licenses and what terms should be included or excluded as part of the negotiation. Mapping of the license terms to an ERM will be reviewed along with an introduction to the ONIX for Publication Licenses (ONIX-PL) schema as the mapping standard.

Part II of the webinar will review key terms in an agreement as highlighted in a sample license. The NISO Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) recommended practice will be introduced and compared to the sample license. The terms from the sample agreement that need to be mapped to the ERM will be highlighted. Two different agreements will be compared to show the differences or overlap in license terms.

Speakers for both parts of the Licensing webinars will be:

• Trisha L. Davis, Associate Professor, Rights Management Coordinator, and Head, Serials & E-Resources Department, The Ohio State University Libraries

• Clinton Chamberlain, Professional Librarian, University of Texas Libraries

You can register for either webinar or both. Register for both webinars and receive a 25% discount! Registration is per site (access for one computer) and includes access to the online recorded archive of the webinar. NISO and NASIG members receive a discounted member rate. A student discount is also available. Can't make it on the webinar date? Register and gain access to the recorded archive for one year. For more information and to register, visit the event webpages:
Part 1; Part 2.

Library Resource Management Systems Forum in Boston, October 8-9

Join NISO for a two-day forum on October 8-9 in Boston on Library Resource Management Systems: New Challenges, New Opportunities where we will consider the issues related to library resource management systems and the consequences for customers, users, vendors, and developers. During this event, we will:

• Explore the effects of changes to the library community on system suppliers' business models

• Compare the benefits and disadvantages of commercial and open-source systems through real libraries' experiences

• Examine the implications of placing library systems in the cloud

• Address the need for interoperability between library management systems and other systems at work in the library

• Consider how information standards can help all stakeholders cope with this shifting terrain

Attendees at all levels of system involvement and expertise will find thought-provoking discussion and ample opportunity to share ideas with the library, vendor, and developer communities. Confirmed speakers include:

• Ivy Anderson, Director, Collection Development & Management Program, California Digital Library

• Annette Bailey, Digital Assets Librarian, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)

• Oren Beit-Arie, Chief Strategy Officer, Ex Libris, Inc.

• Talin Bingham, Chief Technology Officer, SirsiDynix

• Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University

• Vinod Chachra, President and CEO, VTLS

• Galen Charlton, Vice President of Data Services, Equinox Software, Inc.

• John Culshaw, Professor and Associate Director for Administrative Services, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries

• Betsy Graham, Vice President of Product Management, Innovative Interfaces, Inc.

• Carl Grant, President, Ex Libris North America

• Tim McGeary, Senior Systems Specialist, Lehigh University

• Andrew Nagy, Senior Discovery Services Engineer, Serials Solutions

• Diane C. Mirvis, CIO and University Librarian, University of Bridgeport

• Thomas Wall, University Librarian, Boston College

Early bird registration discounts are available through September 23. For the complete agenda, logistics information, and to register, visit the event webpage.

This forum is sponsored by Ex Libris and EBSCO Information Services.

Save the Date for NISO's Remaining Fall Webinars

October 14: Bibliographic Control Alphabet Soup: AACR to RDA and Evolution of MARC

November 11: Data, Data Everywhere: Migration and System Population Practices

December 9: ONIX for Publication Licenses: Adding Structure to Legalese

Two New Work Items at Ballot: Physical Delivery of Library Resources and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles

Ballots have been presented to NISO Voting Members to approve two new work items.

The first is a proposal submitted by Valerie Horton, Executive Director, Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC), on the Physical Delivery of Library Resources—and subsequently approved by NISO's Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee—that aims to develop a statement of best practices. This proposed project would build on the efforts of three recent projects: Moving Mountains, Rethinking Resource Sharing's Physical Delivery Committee, and the American Library Association's ASCLA ICAN's Physical Delivery Discussion Group. The document is proposed to include recommendations for: packaging, shipping codes, labeling, acceptable turn-around time, lost or damaged materials handling, package tracking, ergonomic considerations, statistics, sorting, a set of elements to be used for comparison purposes to determine costs, linking of regional and local library carriers, and international delivery.

The second proposal on Standardized Markup for Journal Articles was submitted by Jeff Beck, Technical Information Specialist, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)—and subsequently approved by NISO's Content & Collection Management Topic Committee—and is based on the National Library of Medicine's journal archiving and interchange tag suite. Three schemas for journal articles are include in the Suite and are maintained by NLM: NLM Archiving and Interchange Tag Set, NLM Journal Publishing Tag Set, and the NLM Article Authoring Tag Set. The goal of this work item is to take the currently existing Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite version 3.0, the three journal article schemas, and the documentation and shepherd them through the NISO process to become an ANSI/NISO consensus standard.

In order for these two proposals to be approved so that Working Groups can be formed to pursue the proposed work, a minimum of 10% of NISO's Voting Members must express interest in each of the new work items. A full list of NISO Voting Members can be found on the NISO website. The Physical Delivery ballot ends on September 1 and Journal Article Markup ends on September 2.

The proposals are available for free download. Public comments are welcome. Assuming the projects are approved, if you would like to be a member of either working group or join the affiliated interest groups, please send a note to: Karen A. Wetzel, NISO Standards Program Manager, or use the website contact form.

Developers of Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Receive Coutts Award for Innovation in Electronic Resources Management

NISO is pleased to announce that Judy Luther, President of Informed Strategies, and Selden Lamoureux, Electronic Resources Librarian at North Carolina State University Libraries, are the recipients of the Coutts Award for Innovation in Electronic Resources Management for their work in developing SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding, a NISO recommended practice.

The award, sponsored by Coutts Information Services, is given by the Collection Management and Development Section (CMDS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS). It was presented to Luther and Lamoureux in an awards ceremony at the American Library Association Conference in Chicago on July 12, 2009.

Read the complete press release here.

For more information on SERU, visit the group's webpage.

In Memoriam: James Joseph Michael

At the annual ALA conference, a memorial resolution was passed honoring James Joseph Michael who passed away at the age of 81 on May 20, 2009.

Michael was a pioneer in the Z39.50 standard's development and implementation and was named a NISO fellow in 1995 in recognition of his extensive work on the development of national and international voluntary standards for libraries, publishing, and information services.

NISO recognizes the many contributions of James Joseph Michael to our community and mourns his loss.

Read the complete ALA resolution here.

Book Industry Communication, Returns Authorization Request and Response and Post Returns Despatch Advice Request and Response, Version 1.0

This pair of services will enable the use of web services to request authorization to return overstocks, faulty or incorrectly supplied products, and raise claims for shortages or invoicing errors; and to then confirm the dispatch of authorized products being returned. These formats are closely based upon the EDItX Returns Authorization Request and Returns Response (version 1.0) formats developed by EDItEUR.

EDItEUR, ONIX Books Code Lists, Issue 10

An update to the code lists used with ONIX for Books. Issue 10 applies mainly to version 2.1 but also includes new lists and values that have been added for Release 3.0 only. To avoid possible confusion, Release 3.0 codes are not included in this eye-readable document, except in a few cases where they are also visible in Release 2.1 schemas. They are included in the comma-delimited and XML files.

ISO 10957:2009, Information and documentation – International standard music number (ISMN)

This is the second edition of the standard that specifies the International standard music number (ISMN), which is a means of uniquely identifying editions of notated music. The most significant change is expanding the ISMN to a 13-digit number, consistent with the new ISBN.

ISO 23081-2:2009, Information and documentation – Managing metadata for records– Part 2: Conceptual and implementation issues

First edition of the standard that establishes a framework for defining metadata elements consistent with the principles and implementation considerations outlined in Part 1 (ISO 23081-1:2006). It further identifies some of the critical decision points that need to be addressed and documented to enable implementation of metadata for managing records.

W3C Working Draft, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0

Provides guidelines for designing user agents that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with disabilities. User agents include browsers and other types of software that retrieve and render Web content. A user agent that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility through its own user interface and through other internal facilities, including its ability to communicate with other technologies (especially assistive technologies).

Lost in the Cloud
New York Times, July 19, 2009; by Jonathan Zittrain

Google's announcement of their Chrome operating system is another sign of the trend towards cloud computing, or doing everything online. Many consider this development a positive one: your data is backed up and you can share more easily with others. But there are many risks. Those providers who hold your data could go bankrupt or take away information you paid for without your permission. Your data may not be private, especially to the government, which could demand and be given access to it without your knowledge. Governments abroad without our protections could monitor your cyberspace information and spy on you for political reasons. A bigger negative impact is on innovation. Currently there is great freedom to write and sell computing applications or to create totally new products. Cloud computing puts much more control back in the hands of the application provider. Facebook, for example, reserves the right to eliminate functions or to add or change fees at any time. Apple limits who can create iPhone applications and has censored e-books and games. Amazon and Google currently have fewer restrictions on their cloud computing offerings. Some method needs to be considered to keep cloud computing vendors more open, such as tax incentives or more forceable regulations. We don't need to stop the cloud trend; we just need to make sure that it doesn't stifle innovation. (Link to Web Source)