CORE (Cost of Resource Exchange) Working Group

Co-chairs: Ted Koppel (Auto-Graphics, Inc.), Ed Riding (formerly at SirsiDynix)
www.niso.org/workrooms/core

The Z39.93-200x, Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE) Protocol was released in April 2009 as a draft standard for trial use. The trial period was originally planned to end on March 31, 2010, but the economic environment precluded any implementations during the trial. As a result, the working group is in discussions about how to proceed, with the hopes of publishing CORE as a standard or recommended practice in the near future. It is felt by the group that extending the trial will not encourage additional implementations at this time, though several working group members indicated that 2011 implementations may occur. The working group, in its deliberations, has agreed that it will also recommend that a standing committee be established to monitor the use of CORE in the event that it is published, as well as to continue to promote the specification and its adoption. A final recommendation from the working group is expected shortly; next steps will be to bring that recommendation to the Topic Committee for approval.

The purpose of this specification is to facilitate the transfer of cost and related financial information from an Integrated Library System (ILS) Acquisitions module (the source) to an Electronic Resource Management System (ERMS) (the requester). The population of ERMS financial data from the ILS Acquisitions system makes cost-per-click and other cost-related reports in the ERMS all the more possible.

E-journal Presentation Working Group

Co-chairs: Cindy Hepfer (University of Buffalo, SUNY), Bob Boissy (Springer)
www.niso.org/workrooms/ ejournalpresentation

This working group was approved by the Business Information Topic Committee in February 2010, and is charged with development of a NISO Recommended Practice for the presentation and identification of e-journals. Unless journal websites accurately and uniformly list all the titles under which content was published, user access to desired content is considerably diminished. This effort will focus on title changes and the supporting metadata that it would be helpful to provide on journal websites in order to alleviate this problem.

At this point, a roster for this working group is still being finalized. Additional representation from the publisher and content provider communities is requested; if you are interested in helping the work of this group, please contact Karen Wetzel, NISO Standards Program Manager, at kwetzel@niso.org.

ERM Data Standards & Best Practices Review Working Group

Co-Chairs: Ivy Anderson (California Digital Library), Tim Jewell (University of Washington)
www.niso.org/workrooms/ermreview

This ERM Data Review Working Group is charged to undertake a gap analysis regarding electronic resource management (ERM) related data, standards and best practices. Following the analysis, the working group will make recommendations regarding the future of the ERMI data dictionary within that broader context, describe typical challenges libraries face in using currently available ERM systems and services, and identify gaps in interoperability and best practices.

The working group is nearly finished with its work of mapping extant standards and best practices to ERMI terms to identify where the existing work meets the needs of ERMI, where related work exists, and what gaps there may be. In addition, a subgroup has been tasked with reviewing existing surveys of ERM use to identify what additional information — if any — may be needed from vendors, libraries using ERM systems, and other identified stakeholders concerning data requirements and ERM system implementation and management issues.

The working group has just released a update report of their work through June 30, 2010. Highlights include:

• Review of mapping work completed
• Review of survey/interview work conducted
• Full listing of outreach and presentations given on the work of this group
• Timeline for the expected completion of the group work and the final report

The full report is now available online at: http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/document. php? document_id=4393

I² (Institutional Identifiers) Working Group

Co-Chairs: Grace Agnew (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey), Oliver Pesch (EBSCO Information Services)
www.niso.org/workrooms/i2

Request for Comments on Institutional Identifier Midterm Work to Date
Feedback Requested by August 2, 2010

The purpose of the Midterm Request for Comments (available at www.niso.org/workrooms/i2/midtermreport) is to provide the NISO I² Working Group with valuable guidance to complete development of the I² standard and to undertake midterm course correction, as needed. The Midterm Release Report describes the purpose and background of the I² identifier as well as seeks comments and responses to specific questions in four areas:

1. The environment and structure of the Institutional Identifier
2. Expected features of the Institutional Identifier and its central registry (in the Midterm release, existing identifier standards are described and compared)
3. Institutional Identifier metadata
4. Scenarios illustrating the use of the Institutional Identifier

The development of useful information standards depends on input from all sectors of the information community. The I² standard has the potential to improve the reliability and efficiency of many business-related transactions including materials acquisition, e-resource management, and interlibrary loan.

The charge to the I² (Institutional Identifier) Working Group is to develop a standard that includes a globally unique institutional identifier string that is usable in the web environment, together with sufficient metadata to uniquely relate the institution to its identifier. The working group is also tasked with identifying a strategy for the implementation of the institutional identifier.

Please send your comments by August 2, 2010 via the feedback survey available from the I² website or to either of the co-chairs, Grace Agnew (gagnew@ rci.rutgers.edu) or Oliver Pesch (OPesch@web.EBSCO.com).

IOTA Working Group

Chair: Adam Chandler (Cornell University)
www.niso.org/workrooms/openurlquality
www.openurlquality.org

The IOTA (Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics) -- formerly called OpenURL Quality Metrics -- Working Group is a two-year project to investigate the feasibility of creating industry-wide, transparent and scalable metrics for evaluating and comparing the quality of OpenURL implementations across content providers. At the end of two years an evaluation process will be conducted and decision made on whether or not to continue the initiative, to be provided in a published NISO Technical Report.

At this time, nearly 8,300,000 OpenURLs have been analyzed from log files supplied by:

• Cornell University
• EBSCO Information Services
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Kansas State University
• Serials Solutions
• WorldCat Link Manager

Visit openurlquality.niso.org to view the data and metrics. If you are willing to share your data to help with this project, please contact Adam Chandler, chair, at alc28@cornell.edu. In addition, the group is working on terminology, user interface & documentation, and outreach about this project.

SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) Standing Committee

Co-chairs: Judy Luther (Informed Strategies), Selden Lamoureux (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
www.niso.org/workrooms/seru

This standing committee provides maintenance and support for NISO RP-7-2008, SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding.

During the ALA Annual Conference held this past June in Washington, DC, members of the SERU Standing Committee informally gathered together at the NISO booth to discuss the status of the group and potential reinvigoration of the committee. During 2010, the standing committee has not met and, though the SERU Registry has been growing (with 44 publishers and content providers, 142 libraries, and 8 consortia) and use of SERU has increased in this time, active work from the group hadn't been needed in that time. However, standing committee members agree that the group will reconvene regularly in order to address some items that have arisen in the last year, including:

• A need to update the SERU website to ensure that support is available to those interested in SERU
• A need for continued promotion and outreach about SERU, particularly to smaller publishers
• A need to address questions that have arisen about the use of SERU internationally
• A need to discuss and consider issues and questions that have arisen around how SERU might be applied to e-book licensing

The standing committee plans to meet monthly via teleconference call.

SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) Standing Committee

Co-chairs: Hana Levay (University of Washington), Oliver Pesch (EBSCO Information Services)
www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi
www.niso.org/standards/z39-93-2007/

This standing committee provides maintenance and support for ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2007, The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesiting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol.

The SUSHI Server Registry -- a registry of available SUSHI servers -- is publicly available from the NISO website and can be used by libraries and usage consolidation system suppliers to aid them in setting up the harvesting of their COUNTER reports. Interested in joining the registry? Visit sites.google.com/site/ sushiserverregistry/. Current Registry Participants:

• ACM (ACM Digital Library)
• AIP (Scitation)
• American Chemical Society (ACS Publications)
• APA (APA PsycNET)
• EBSCO Publishing (EBSCOhost)
• EBSCO Subcription Services (EJS)
• HighWire Press
• IOP Publishing (IOP Electronic Journals)
• IOP Publishing (IOP Science)
• Karger Publishers
• MetaPress
• Oxford Journals
• Physicians Postgraduate Press (PPP)
• Project Euclid
• ProQuest
• Publishing Technology (IngentaConnect)
• Swets (Swetswise)
• Thomson Reuters (Web of Knowledge)

The SUSHI Standing Committee has also recently updated a wide variety of resources to help support those who are interested in implementing and using SUSHI to help ease the delivery of COUNTER e-resource usage data reports. Visit the website for:

• SUSHI FAQs: General, Librarian, Content Provider, and COUNTER questions (updated July 2010)
• Getting Started Pages: For librarians, SUSHI server developers, and SUSHI client developers SUSHI Tools & Other Aids
• SUSHI Reports Registry: XML and Excel sample COUNTER payload files for each report for use in SUSHI testing (new reports added July 2010)
• SUSHI Schemas

More information is being added to the website regularly. In addition, you are encouraged to join the SUSHI Developers e-mail list to share experiences and post questions about the protocol for other implementers to assist in problem solving. For more information, visit www.niso.org/lists/sushidevelopers/

DAISY Standard Revision Working Group

Co-chairs: George Kerscher (DAISY), Markus Gylling (DAISY)
www.niso.org/workrooms/daisy
www.daisy.org/daisy-standard
www.niso.org/standards/z39-86-2005/

The DAISY Standard, officially ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005, Specifications for the Digital Talking Book, Is under revision. The specification will be divided into two parts: Part A, Authoring and Interchange, and Part B, Distribution. Both parts will be released as draft standards for trial use and will remain in these phases until both are ready for submission to NISO for formal approval. See the April quarterly progress report of this group online.

Revision of the DAISY Standard: ZedAI Public Draft Available for Review
The DAISY (ANSI/NISO Z39.86) Authoring and Interchange Framework - ZedAI for short, is a specification that defines the next generation of DAISY XML. The ZedAI Framework is one of the two parts in the ongoing major revision of the DAISY Standard. The specification is intended to be submitted to NISO for formal standardization in the fourth quarter of 2010, with final approval expected in the spring of 2011.

The first major ZedAI public draft for review by the DAISY community is now available at the Z39.86 Specification Document Working Area on the DAISY Consortium website. The review phase will last until the end of the third quarter of 2010. Updated working drafts will be made available during the review phase, as a result of community input.

Please use the ZedAI forum and/or the issue tracker to provide feedback. A list of items that reviewers are asked to focus on is available from the ZedAI User Portal.

Journal Article Versions Recommended Practice Survey

Survey Lead: Lettie Conrad (SAGE Publications, Inc.)
www.surveymonkey.com/s/PBJSPKR

Survey Now Open -- Feedback Requested by July 16, 2010
Online publishing allows for the release of multiple versions of journal articles -- and these growing practices are redefining our concept of "publishing" and the "version of record." How do we determine when a manuscript is considered final? Which version should be cited? How do we best indicate online article versions?

In 2008, NISO published the Recommended Practice, NISO RP-8-2008 Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group. The recommended version classifications could be incorporated into article metadata for database management, archiving and cataloging, online display, and more.

This survey intends to find out more about how organizations manage version control of journal articles, and to what extent the recommendations of the JAV report are being used. Following the survey, a report of the results will be provided to the Content & Collection Management Topic Committee and made public to the information community.

RFID in Libraries Revision Working Group

Co-chairs: Vinod Chachra (VTLS, Inc.), Paul Sevcik (3M Library Systems)
www.niso.org/workrooms/rfid

In order to ensure that the NISO Recommended Practice on the same topic is up to date and provides United States implementers of RFID tags in libraries with sufficient guidance to conform with the ISO standard on RFID in libraries (expected publication: late 2010), a revision of the NISO Recommended Practice is necessary. The RFID Revision Working Group met for the first time in April 2010, and since then have been reviewing the original recommended practice to identify areas where revision is necessary, reviewing the ISO work to determine a US position on the adoption of part 2 or part 3 of the ISO standard, discussing what potential position the group might recommend regarding encoding and UHF, and other issues.

The revised document is expected late 2010/early 2011.

Standardized Markup for Journal Articles Working Group

Co-chairs: Jeff Beck (National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine), B. Tommie Usdin (Mulberry Technologie, Inc.
www.niso.org/workrooms/journalmarkup

This working group aims to 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. The intent of this proposal is for the Tag Suite to be a NISO standard and each of the schemas to be a "sub-standard" or appendix to the Tag Suite standard.

The working group has nearly completed work on outstanding requests for Version 3.0 of the NLM Article DTDs, and is now moving to the writing phase for the new version of the draft standard. At this time, final decisions are being made as to how the standard will be formatted and made available, and discussions regarding how to ensure the availabilty of supporting documentation are underway. The draft standard is expected to be available in the next few months.

As an outreach activity, NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) will be hosting the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) on November 1-2, 2010 at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Project

Business Working Group
Co-chairs: Linda Beebe (American Psychological Association), Marie McVeigh (Thomson Reuters)
Technical Working Group
Co-chairs: Dave Martinsen (American Chemical Society), Sasha Schwarzman (American Geophysical Union)
http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/supplementary/

This new work item was approved in April 2010. At this time, rosters for the two working groups have been formed (awaiting final Topic Committee approval), and coordination for the establishment of the group and the coordination of the group work is underway. The chairs are currently looking at holding their first working group conference calls during the first week in August. Regular monthly calls with the project leaders are additionally planned to help with communication between the groups.

A Stakeholders Interest Group, to consist of any people who are interested in following this project, has also been established. To join, visit www.niso.org/lists/suppinfo. This group list will serve as a way for the working groups to share information about their work with the community, as a forum for questions and feedback about that work, and will serve as a place to solicit comments on draft work.

This project follows the January 22, 2010 meeting on this topic, and acts on the recommendation of that group to move forward in this manner (as noted in the report from that meeting). The goal of the project is to create a Recommended Practice for publisher inclusion, handling, display, and preservation of supplemental journal article materials.

NISO/UKSG KBART Phase 2 Working Group

Co-chairs: Andreas Biedenbach (Springer Science+Business Media), Sarah Pearson (University of Birmingham)
kbart@niso.org
www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart
www.uksg.org/kbart

The NISO/UKSG KBART Phase II Working Group was formed in March 2010, and is tasked with provinding support for the Phase I Recommended Practice, NISO RP-9-2010, KBART: Knowledge Bases and Related Tools, as well as to develop a second recommended practice to build on the initial recommendations delivered for Phase I of the KBART project in order to effect smoother interaction between members of the knowledge base supply chain. Whereas the Phase I report provided minimum recommendations to reach this goal, the Phase II report will focus on the more advanced, complex issues that cause problems in this area, as defined in the Next Steps portion of the Phase I report.

The working group has worked on promotion via presentations, articles, organization endorsements of KBART, and a publishers handout that explaining the benefits of KBART and the KBARt adoption process is in final review and is expected to be available Monday, July 19th. In addition, a new KBART Registry of knowledge base supply chain contacts, is now available. Current registry participants include:

• American Institute of Physics
• Annual Reviews
• EBSCO Information Services
• EBSCO Publishing
• Ex Libris
• Ingenta Connect
• OCLC
• Serials Solutions
• Springer Science and Business Media
• Swets

In addition, the group is looking at issues for the Phase II recommended practice, including e-books, conference proceedings, hosting services, open access content, and more.

NCIP (NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol) Standing Committee

Chair: Gail Wanner (SirsiDynix)
Maintenance Agency: EnvisionWare (contact: Rob Walsh)
www.niso.org/workrooms/ncip
www.ncip.info

This standing committee provides guidance to the published standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.83-2008 NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP). In early 2010 this standard was shifted from a periodically maintained standard that undergoes a review every five years to a continuously maintained standard that allows for regular updating and changes through established procedures.

At this time, the working group is reviewing update issues for the standard as well as looking at developing support documentation, including: Is NCIP Restful?, NCIP Statement Regarding Versions, NCIP for Dummies: Or Getting Started with NCIP, and Core Messages Explained. In addition, an NCIP Implementer Registry for both initiators and responders is near completion -- the registry will help libraries to learn about NCIP implementers and the messages they have implemented.

Physical Delivery of Library Resources Working Group

Co-chairs: Valerie Horton (Colorado Library Consortium), Diane Sachs-Silveira (Tampa Bay Library Consortium)
www.niso.org/workrooms/physdel

This working group is tasked with developing a Recommended Practice for the delivery of physical library resources. Following the finalization of the draft outline of content for the final report, the group started with group writing of the recommendations. Following this initial group work, the remaining sections will now be divided amongst the group members for drafting. Once the full outline content is drafted, the content will be brought together for full group review and editing prior to making the draft available for public comment.

SSO (Single Sign-On) Authentication Working Group

Co-chairs: Harry Kaplanian (Serials Solutions), Steven Carmody (Brown University)
www.niso.org/workrooms/sso

New Name Announced!
The SSO Working Group is happy to announce a new name for this initiative, ESPReSSO: Establishing Suggested Practices Regarding Single Sign-On. This new name will help with identifying the work and with promotion. Interested in helping to design a logo? Contact Karen Wetzel, NISO Standards Program Manager, at kwetzel@niso.org.

The working group was formed to develop recommendations that will improve the user experience by providing consistency, improved usability, and an SSO experience across a set of distributed service providers. The end result of this work will be small, smart conventions for moving the user within a session seamlessly from licensed site to licensed site.

The working group has focused its efforts on four deliverables:

• Deliverable 1: Standardizing terminology
• Deliverable 2: Standardizing user interface presentation for user authentication
• Deliverable 3: Identifying approaches that allow federated search technologies and portals to leverage existing web SSO authentication sessions of a user when contacting backend service provider sites
• Deliverable 4: Provide
plans for the promotion and adoption of these recommended practices to make the access improvements a reality

At this time, the initial group work is near completion, and drafting of recommended practice document has begun.

Describing and Identifying Subject Repositories

Work is underway to develop an upcoming new work item proposal for a working group to develop a recommended practice that defines and maps common terminology for describing and identifying subject repositories, with recommended terms for use across tools for repository development. The impetus for this work is the belief that, for subject repositories to become the subject of effective, comprehensive research or, perhaps more fundamentally, to be differentiated from institutional, funder, and other repository types, a standard terminology for their description and identification is required.