E-book Special Interest Group

Survey results prioritizing the brainstorming output of the initial subgroups of the E-book Special Interest Group—Accessibility, Discovery Tools & Linking, Distribution, and General Metadata—are under discussion by the NISO Architecture Committee and the three Topic Committees to determine which items should be pursued by NISO as new work initiatives over the coming year. More information, including webinar recordings, can be found at the E-book SIG webpage.

DDA (Demand-Driven Acquisitions of Monographs) Working Group

Co-chairs: Barbara Kawecki (YBP Library Services); Michael Levine-Clark (University of Denver)
DDA Workroom
DDA New Work Item Proposal

This recently approved new project is to develop recommended practices for the Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) of Monographs. The formation of the working group is under way, with a group expected to begin meeting by the end of August.

This working group will develop a flexible model for DDA that works for publishers, vendors, aggregators, and libraries. This model will allow libraries to develop DDA plans that meet differing local collecting and budgetary needs while also allowing consortial participation and cross-aggregator implementation.

The group will develop recommendations on:

• Best practices for populating and managing the pool of titles under consideration for potential purchase, including methods for automated updating and removal of discovery records
• Development of consistent models for the three basic aspects of e-book DDA—free discovery to prevent inadvertent transactions, temporary lease, and purchase—that work for publishers and libraries
• Methods for managing DDA of multiple formats
• Ways in which print-on-demand (POD) solutions can be linked to DDA

Those interested in following the work of this effort can join the DDA interest group mailing list.

I² (Institutional Identifiers) Working Group

Co-Chairs: Grace Agnew (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey), Oliver Pesch (EBSCO Information Services)
I² Workroom

The I² Working Group was established to develop a robust, scalable, and interoperable standard for identifying a core entity in any information management or sharing transaction—the institution. The I² Working Group did extensive community needs assessment with the publishing, library, and repository use sectors.

Concurrent with these efforts, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was developing a standard for a "name" identifier for public parties "involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains," which resulted in the March 2012 publication of ISO 27729, Information and documentation – International standard name identifier (ISNI).

In early 2011, the I² Working Group initiated discussions with the ISNI International Agency (ISNI-IA) about the potential of using the ISNI standard and the ISNI-IA's infrastructure for institutional identification, rather than publishing a separate standard for institutions. An agreement to use ISNI for institutional identification resulted from these discussions, and I² contributed further recommendations to the ISNI-IA, which were incorporated into the ISNI operating procedures. The ISNI-IA has subsequently appointed Ringgold and Bowker as ISNI Registration Agencies for institutions.

In wrapping up its work, the I² Working Group is now finalizing a Recommended Practice, expected to be published in Q3 2012. This document will provide information on a profile that can be used by appropriate Registration Agencies to apply ISNI to institutions and will successfully conclude the significant research and analysis undertaken by the I² Working Group.

PIE-J (Presentation and Identification of E-Journals) Working Group

Co-chairs: Cindy Hepfer (University of Buffalo, SUNY), Bob Boissy (Springer)
PIE-J Workroom

PIE-J exists to help users, working in online environments, more easily access article-based materials using citation elements. The PIE-J working group has been working on a recommended practice intended to assist publishers, platform providers, abstracting and indexing services, knowledgebase providers, aggregators, and other concerned parties in facilitating online discovery, identification, and access for journal-based publications.

The draft PIE-J Recommended Practice was released in early summer for a 45-day comment period. This comment period recently closed and the Working Group is now evaluating the input provided by the community for possible further modifications to the Recommended Practice. It expects to publish the final Recommended Practice, after approval by the Business Information Topic Committee, in early fall 2012.

Regina Reynolds presented an overview and update on PIE-J as part of a NISO panel at the 2012 NASIG conference in Nashville, TN, in early June.

SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) Standing Committee

Co-chairs: Judy Luther (Informed Strategies), Selden Lamoureux (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
SERU Workroom
SERU Recommended Practice (NISO RP-7-2012)

The SERU Recommended Practice, originally published in 2008, underwent revisions to enable it to become more flexible in order to be used with online products beyond e-journals. The revision was published in May 2012 along with substantial revisions to the SERU public workroom pages, which are intended to better support publishers and libraries in understanding and use of the SERU material. New pages targeted to these users now exist, and of course the SERU Registry is still available to enable supporters of SERU, both publishers and librarians, to identify each other.

Currently the SERU Standing Committee is enjoying a well-deserved summer break before beginning a new meeting series in August to work on further publicity and education on SERU.

SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) Standing Committee

Co-chairs: Bob McQuillan (Innovative Interfaces), Oliver Pesch (EBSCO Information Services)
SUSHI Workroom
SUSHI standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2007)

This Standing Committee provides maintenance and support for ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2007, The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol, and acts as the maintenance group for the COUNTER schema by providing recommendations to COUNTER and making changes to the COUNTER XML schemas (as approved by COUNTER).

Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice (COP) was published in Spring 2012 with a deadline date of December 31, 2013 for implementation. The Standing Committee has made some updates to the SUSHI website in this regard, notably in the area of the reports registry. Also updated for COUNTER COP 4, the COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile (NISO RP-14-201x), expected to be published in late July, sets out detailed expectations on how SUSHI and COUNTER XML reports should be implemented, and will ease interaction between servers and clients.

Paul Needham, the liaison to the Standing Committee from JISC, recently contributed a new SUSHI client, named SUSHIStarters. It is a free, "beginners", open source program with a web-based user interface to support the downloading/retrieval of COUNTER-compliant SUSHI reports, and consists of a series of webforms and guidance notes that "walk" users through the steps and parameters needed to connect successfully to the SUSHI servers and download the reports of a number of major vendors.

In June, the Standing Committee also welcomed new committee members, James Van Mil of the University of Cincinnati and Marie Kennedy of Loyola Marymount University. Also in June, Oliver Pesch, co-chair of the SUSHI Standing Committee, presented at the 2012 Society for Scholarly Publishers Annual meeting in Arlington, VA.

Z39.7 Data Dictionary Standing Committee

Chair: Martha Kyrillidou (Association of Research Libraries (ARL))
Z39.7 Data Dictionary

The Information Services and Use: Metrics & statistics for libraries and information providers – Data Dictionary (ANSI/NISO Z39.7) is an online standard that is continuously maintained. The purpose of the Data Dictionary is to assist the information community by indicating and defining useful quantifiable information to measure the resources and performance of libraries and to provide a body of valid and comparable data on American libraries. It identifies standard definitions, methods, and practices relevant to library statistics activities in the United States. The Data Dictionary is provided online, and any user may submit suggested changes through a comment box which is available on each of the online pages. The Standing Committee then reviews these suggestions during its monthly phone calls.

The Committee is now reviewing the latest updated version of Z39.7 for Committee approval before sending to its Voting pool for formal approval, and has been discussing related topics on its calls, such as the recent draft of ISO 2789, International Library Statistics, examining it for impact on ANSI/NISO Z39.7.

DAISY Standard Revision Working Group

Co-chairs: George Kerscher (DAISY), Markus Gylling (DAISY)
DAISY Revision Workroom
ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005 (R2012), Specifications for the Digital Talking Book
Final Draft: NISO Z39.98-201x, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification

The original work of this group, a revision of ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005, Specifications for the Digital Talking Book (DTB), has developed into a totally new standard. The existing DTB standard has been reaffirmed by NISO and ANSI and is still available for use during a transition period for content makers and e-reader manufacturers to migrate to the new standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification. Z39.98 was recently approved by NISO and ANSI; its publication is imminent—watch for the press release announcing it!

Digital Bookmarking and Annotation Sharing Working Group

Co-chairs: Baden Hughes (Cabahu Pty Ltd), Dan Whaley (hypothes.is)
Digital Bookmarking and Annotation Workroom
Digital Bookmarking New Work Item Proposal

This Working Group, formed following discussion meetings funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation held in October 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany, and San Francisco, CA, is working to address the system requirements and syntax specification for online citation and annotation sharing. There is a need in digital environments (especially in the realm of e-books) to locate reference points and share citations and annotations for the same text across a variety of hardware platforms, likely across various editions.

The meetings of this group, consisting of libraries, suppliers, members of trade associations, and other interested parties, have included discussion of related efforts, such as the Open Annotation Collaboration. The group is continuing to formulate its scope and overall work plan, intending to release a draft specification for use in early 2013.

Standardized Markup for Journal Articles Working Group (JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite)

Co-chairs: Jeff Beck (National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine), B. Tommie Usdin (Mulberry Technologies, Inc.)
JATS Workroom
Final Draft: NISO Z39.96-201x, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) created the Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite with the intent of providing a common format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content. This standard, NISO Z39.96-201x, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite ("JATS 1.0"), is the intellectual successor to the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite version 3.0.

Work of shepherding the Tag Suite through the ANSI/NISO standardization process is now nearly complete; the proposed standard has been approved by the Content and Collections Management Topic Committee and is in the process of approval by the applicable NISO Voting Pool. Following this step, approval by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is required before the final standard is published.

In addition to the element and attribute descriptions, three journal article tag sets (the Archiving and Interchange Tag Set, the Journal Publishing Tag Set, and the Article Authoring Tag Set) have been provided as part of NISO JATS 1.0. Changes to the Tag Suite under NLM have always been user-driven. Following final publication of the standard, NISO will form a JATS Standing Committee to evaluate further user-suggested changes and decide on appropriate actions. The intent is to put this standard under continuous maintenance and allow ongoing user feedback and revisions as needed.

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)
Supplemental Journal Article Materials Workroom

The goal of this joint NISO-NFAIS Working Group is to create a Recommended Practice for publisher inclusion, handling, display, and preservation of supplemental journal article materials. Two working groups were established to undertake this work.

The Business Working Group, addressing semantic and policy issues, released its draft document, Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part A: Business Policies and Practices (NISO RP-15-201x) for comment earlier this year and has worked through the input and finalized its recommendations.

The Technical Working Group, addressing "how-to" aspects of implementation covering linking, packaging, and archiving, has released today Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part B: Technical Recommendations, for comment through September 15, 2012. Both the draft and an online commenting form are available from the Supplemental Journal Article Materials Workroom. During this time Part A will be available for reference.

Following a period of review and response and final approval, Part A and Part B are intended to be published jointly by NISO and NFAIS in late fall 2012.

Improving OpenURL Through Analytics (IOTA) Working Group

Chair: Adam Chandler (Cornell University)
IOTA Workroom
IOTA Website including blog and analytic log files
Follow on Twitter: @nisoiota

The IOTA (Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics) 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 providers, so as to provide benchmarks against which improvements to OpenURLs can be made, thereby bettering linking for end users. This initiative, which began in early 2010, is intended to be two and a half years in duration.

Following its final technical experiment to empirically correlate its completeness rating, which was a few months in duration, the IOTA working group is now in the process of drafting its final report to include this analysis. Another outcome of this experiment will be a recommended practice document targeted to link resolvers. The group expects these documents to be finalized in the coming months.

Adam Chandler, chair of IOTA, led the May 14, 2012 NISO Open Teleconference, for which a recording is available. Rafal Kaprowski, Susan Marcin, and Oliver Pesch presented or co-presented at the Texas Library Association conference in Houston in April, the New York Technical Services Librarians Spring Program in New York in May; the American Library Association conference in Anaheim in June, and the Special Libraries Association conference in Chicago in July. Their presentations are available on the IOTA workroom resources page.

The IOTA reporting system is available at openurlquality.niso.org/ and continues to welcome data and comments from participating libraries to help with analysis.

NISO/UKSG Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (KBART) Phase 2 Working Group

Co-chairs: Andreas Biedenbach (Independent Publishing Professional), Sarah Pearson (University of Birmingham)
Contact KBART Chairs for endorsement approval
KBART Workroom (NISO)
KBART Website (UKSG)

The NISO/UKSG KBART Phase II Working Group is working to provide support for the Phase I Recommended Practice, NISO RP-9-2010, KBART: Knowledge Bases and Related Tools, and is also developing a second Recommended Practice to build on the recommendations of the first, specifically addressing the areas of metadata for e-books and conference proceedings and packages licensed via consortia deals. In addition, the Working Group is exploring the area of open access materials and how this metadata might be published and shared in knowledgebases.

Work for the latest quarter for the KBART Working Group has included further subgroup meetings to draft materials regarding the e-books/conference proceedings and consortial packages metadata and discussions on requirements and limitations regarding open access content.

Further approval of publisher files will be formalized in August with a press release announcement of these endorsements. Contact information for all KBART endorsers can be found on the KBART Registry. Registration of contact details does not require endorsement.

Chad Hutchens, KBART Working Group member, will participate on the September NISO Open Teleconference on Monday, September 10.

NCIP (NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol) Standing Committee

Chair: Mike Dicus (Ex Libris)
Maintenance Agency: EnvisionWare (contact: Rob Walsh)
NCIP Workroom
NCIP Maintenance Agency
ANSI/NISO Z39.83-1-2008 NISO Circulation Interchange Part 1: Protocol (NCIP)
ANSI/NISO Z39.83-2-2008 NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) Part 2: Implementation Profile 1

The NCIP Standing Committee reviews status of implementations and other general business on monthly calls. Twice a year, in-person meetings are held in order to review ongoing updates to the NCIP protocol.

The latest version of NCIP, version 2.02, incorporates all defect and change requests noted through 2011. This document has now been approved by its NISO Voting Pool members and is in the process of approval by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), after which it will be published as an ANSI/NISO standard, superseding the 2008 version. Changes included in this updated version of NCIP include the addition of repeatable, optional Bibliographic Id added to the Loaned Item and Requested Item elements; addition of optional Date Due to the Item Optional Fields; addition of "UPC" and "GTIN" to the Bibliographic Item Identifier Code scheme; addition of "DVD" and "Blu-Ray" to the Medium Type scheme; and addition of a Lookup Item Service.

The spring NCIP in-person meeting, hosted by TLC, took place in Winchester, VA in April. Topics discussed included implementer updates, new change requests for NCIP, and the NCIP Implementers' Registry. The fall in-person meeting will take place October 9-10 in Tallahassee, FL. All comments to be considered at this meeting must be submitted by August 1.

ODI (Open Discovery Initiative) Working Group

Co-chairs: Marshall Breeding (Vanderbilt University), Jenny Walker (Ex Libris)
ODI Workroom
ODI New Work Item Proposal

The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) aims at defining standards and/or best practices for the new generation of library discovery services that are based on indexed search. The Working Group, made up of discovery vendors, primary and secondary publishers, and librarians, has been meeting regularly since January.

Now well into its information gathering phase, the group has split into four subgroups covering different areas of discovery: technical formats; communication of library's rights/level of indexing; definition of fair linking; and usage statistics. The subgroups have been spending the last few months investigating their topical areas and interviewing subjects as appropriate; during the next few weeks each subgroup will contribute survey questions to enable ODI to conduct one joint survey of its constituencies during August and September.

Most members of the ODI Working Group were able to attend in person or via telephone a group meeting that was held at the American Library Association conference in Anaheim in June.

Marshall Breeding, ODI co-chair, presented on the goals and progress of ODI as part of a NISO panel at the NASIG annual conference in Nashville, TN in June. Those interested in following the work of this effort can join the ODI interest group mailing list.

ResourceSync Working Group

Co-chairs: Todd Carpenter (NISO), Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
ResourceSync Workroom
ResourceSync New Work Item Proposal

The ResourceSync working group is now in the full throes of researching, developing, prototyping, testing and deploying mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources. The work is intended to allow for the synchronization of web-based objects themselves, not just their metadata and builds on the OAI-PMH strategies.

The core group, which has been funded by the Sloan Foundation, is augmented by other industry and research participants. These group members have conducted meetings primarily by WebEx (with further discussions taking place via IRC) to enable the best sharing of perspectives over distance. June saw a 2-day in-person meeting take place in Washington, DC, which enabled the group to review its progress, make decisions about technologies utilized, and solidify its work calendar regarding its draft specification. Members are spending the summer working on this material, which is intended to be available for public review and testing in early fall 2012.

Simeon Warner of Cornell University presented on ResourceSync's work at the Open Repositories 2012 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland in July. Slides from the group's June meeting are also available.

SIP (Standard Interchange Protocol) Working Group

Co-chairs: John Bodfish (OCLC), Ted Koppel (Auto-Graphics)
SIP Workroom
SIP New Work Item Proposal

This new work item, approved by the NISO Voting Membership in May 2012, is currently in the process of forming its working group. The Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP), introduced by 3M in 1993, provides a standard communication mechanism to allow Integrated Library Systems (ILS) applications and self-service devices to communicate seamlessly to perform self-service transactions and has become the de facto standard around the world to integrate ILSs and self-service devices.

The SIP working group, once formed, will take the currently existing SIP version 3.0 specification and direct it through the NISO standardization process. The specific goals will be formulated by the group itself, but work will likely include assessment the current protocol for fitness in the current landscape and work with the NCIP Standing Committee to consider how SIP fits with NCIP.

If you are interested in serving on this working group, please contact Nettie Lagace.