Recommended Practices for Demand-Driven Acquisition Working Group

Co-chairs: Barbara Kawecki (YBP Library Services); Michael Levine-Clark (University of Denver)
DDA Workroom
NISO Work Item: Develop Recommended Practices for Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) of Monographs

This new project, which intends to develop a Recommended Practices for the Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) of Monographs, is now under way with its roster approved by the Business Information Topic Committee in September. As described in the initial work item, 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; and ways in which print-on-demand (POD) solutions can be linked to DDA.

The Working Group has held several meetings to discuss the process by which the recommendations will be developed and they are forming three subgroups to discuss the following areas of work: technical processes, access methods, and metric modeling.

Co-chair Michael Levine-Clark discussed the work of the DDA-RP group on the October 15 NISO Open Teleconference, and also presented at the NISO E-Book Renaissance 2: Challenges and Opportunities Forum in Boston on October 18. Levine-Clark will be presenting again with co-chair Barbara Kawecki at the Charleston Conference, Thursday November 8.

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 disscusions, and I² contributed further recommendations to the ISNI-IA that were incorporated into the ISNI standard.

The I² Working Group is now finalizing a Recommended Practice, expected to be published in the next few months. 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

Electronic journals (e-journals) are a critical component of the global scholarly infrastructure. As is the case with print journals, the contents of e-journals and their related metadata become part of the historical scholarly record. Citations to articles in print journals, and now in e-journals, form the basis for much scholarly research. The PIE-J Recommended Practice is being developed in order to provide guidance on the presentation of these e-journals—particularly in the areas of title presentation, accurate use of ISSN, and citation practices—to publishers and platform providers as well as to solve some long-standing concerns of serials librarians. This will help users, working in online environments, more easily access article-based materials using citation elements.

The draft PIE-J Recommended Practice was available for a 45-day open comment period, which ran from May 22 to July 19. Several dozen substantial comments were offered, and the Working Group has spent several meetings working through them and determining the most appropriate way to address them. This work is now almost complete and the group is putting the finishing touches on the Recommended Practice as well as the responses to comments, which will be made available to those who submitted comments. The Recommended Practice will soon be approved by the Working Group and then sent to the Business Information Topic Committee for its review and approval before official publication, expected by early December.

Working Group members Edward Cilurso and Steven Shadle will speak about PIE-J at the upcoming Charleston Conference, on Thursday, November 8 at 2:15 pm.

SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) Standing Committee

Co-chairs: Adam Chesler (Business Expert Press), Anne McKee (Greater Western Library Alliance
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. It was published in May 2012 along with substantial revisions to the SERU public workroom pages, which were 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.

The SERU Standing Committee recently welcomed new co-chairs Adam Chesler and Anne McKee, and is now planning its next phases of work, intending to further publicize SERU and educate libraries and publishers via direct contacts and public presentations at industry conferences. The Standing Committee has also reviewed an updated version of the ONIX-PL expression for SERU, which will soon be linked from its web pages.

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 was published in Spring 2012 with a deadline date of December 31, 2013 for implementation. In support of this update, the Standing Committee has published a Recommended Practice, COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile (NISO RP-14-2012) which sets out detailed expectations on how SUSHI and COUNTER XML reports should be implemented, and will ease interaction between servers and clients.

The Standing Committee is also preparing further updates to the SUSHI workroom pages and is in the progress of writing new software tools to help developers and libraries make the best use of SUSHI with COUNTER COP 4.

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 in the process of approving the latest updated version of Z39.7 before this standard will be sent to its Voting pool for formal approval. In addition the Committee is discussing community comments on the recent draft of a related standard, ISO 2789, International Library Statistics, examining it for impact on ANSI/NISO Z39.7. The Committee also expects to discuss a new ISO standard, ISO 16439 (Methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries), which is currently in development and is anticipated to be available for review later this year.

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
ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification

This Working Group's work is now complete. Its original task was to revise ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005, Specifications for the Digital Talking Book. This initiative spawned an additional new standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification, which was recently approved by ANSI and published. This work is anticipated to be used to represent content in a wide variety of genres, e.g. textbooks, newspapers, and trade books. Distribution requirements for accessibility are met by the EPUB 3 specification.

Prior to publication of ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, the existing standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005 (R2012), was reaffirmed by NISO and ANSI in order to be available for use during a transition period for content makers and e-reader manufacturers.

Digital Bookmarking and Annotation Sharing Working Group

Co-chairs: Ken Haase (beingmeta, inc.), Dan Whaley (hypothes.is)
E-Book Annotation Sharing and Social Reading workshops webpage

This Working Group, formed following discussion meetings funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and 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. Group participants include libraries, suppliers, and members of trade associations

The Working Group is now finalizing its scope of work, including definitions for its relationship with the work of the Open Annotation Collaboration, and is discussing next steps toward creation of a draft specification for use in 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

ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite has now been approved and published, and HTML and PDF versions, along with supporting documentation and schemas are linked from the NISO JATS Workroom page. All material is also available at a dedicated site, jats.niso.org. This standard is the intellectual successor to the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite version 3.0; those migrating from this DTD will find the upgrade to the standard now known as JATS 1.0 to be a minor change as it's completely backwards compatible with the NLM DTD 3.0.

JATS was originally created by the National Library of Medicine in order to provide a common format for publishers and archives to exchange journal content.

Key improvements in JATS 1.0 are:

• Support for multi-script metadata (e.g. Japanese and Roman script author names)
• Wider support for some attributes such as specific-use
• Many other minor improvements to cover less common situations found in journal articles

Work will soon be underway to convene a JATS Standing Committee who can evaluate further user-suggested changes and decide on appropriate actions. The intent is to put this standard under continuous maintenance, and allow it to continue to change based on user comment.

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, released its document, Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part B: Technical Working Group Recommendations, for a 45-day comment period which closed in mid-September 2012. The Technical Working Group is now meeting to review and respond to comments, and make appropriate updates and edits to its document. After final approval by the Working Group and the Content and Collections Management Topic Committee, 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. The IOTA reporting system is available at openurlquality.niso.org/ and continues to welcome data and comments from participating libraries to help with analysis.

Following on a 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 and editing its final report to include this analysis, including a recommended practice document targeted to link resolvers. The group expects these documents to be finalized, approved, and published in the coming months.

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.

Subgroups representing each of these areas are continuing their efforts in drafting sections of an overall document describing recommendations. The overall Working Group is now moving toward putting the sub-sections together into a draft-for-comment version, which is intended to be released in the coming months.

Recently, BioOne, JSTOR, LOCKSS, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and SpringerLink (hosted by Metapress) were the latest publishers to publicly endorse the Phase I recommendations. Contact information for all KBART endorsers can be found on the KBART Registry. Registration of contact details does not require endorsement, though all content providers, from major databases to small publishers, are encouraged to publicly endorse the KBART Recommended Practice by submitting a sample file to the KBART working group. Once the file's format and content has been reviewed and approved, and the provider has made it publicly available (in line with the recommendations), the provider will be added to a public list of endorsing providers.

Chad Hutchens, KBART Working Group member, participated on the September NISO Open Teleconference on Monday, September 10, for which a recording is available.

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 Z39.83-1-2012 (version 2.02), NISO Circulation Interchange - Part 1: Protocol (NCIP)
ANSI/NISO Z39.83-2-2012 (version 2.02), 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, which incorporates all defect and change requests noted through 2011, has now been published as an ANSI/NISO standard and is available via the NCIP Workroom page. Changes included in this updated version of NCIP include the addition of repeatable, optional Bibliographic Id to Loaned Item and Requested Item; addition of optional Date Due to Item Optional Fields; addition of UPC and GTIN to Bibliographic Item Identifier Code scheme; addition of DVD and Blu-Ray to Medium Type scheme; and addition of Lookup Item Service.

The fall NCIP in-person meeting took place October 9-10 in Tallahassee, FL. Discussion topics included implementer updates, Version 2 defects and change requests, support for the Implementers' Registry, discussion on cooperation and communication with the NISO SIP initiative, and activities planning for 2013. The spring 2013 meeting location and dates are still to be determined, but all comments to be considered at this meeting must be submitted by March 1, 2013.

Open Discovery Initiative Working Group

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

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, which has been meeting regularly since January, is made up of discovery vendors, primary and secondary publishers, and librarians.

The Working 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 meeting to investigate their topical areas and interview subjects as appropriate and are now moving into the phase of drafting their individual sub-group documents, which will be put together into an overall ODI Recommended Practice draft for comment intended to be made available in early 2013; included in this topical input will be results from a substantial survey ODI ran during August and September. The Working Group also intends to make a specific survey report available to respondents later this year.

Those interested in following the work of this effort can join the ODI observer mailing list at www.niso.org/lists/opendiscovery/.

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 continues its work of researching, developing, prototyping, testing and deploying mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources, nearing the stage when its draft will be made available for beta testing and public comment. 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. The full group met in Denver at the end of September in order to discuss its latest draft's positive aspects and shortcomings; following that meeting further redrafting and testing has taken place. The updated material is intended to be made available before the end of the year.

Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the group's co-chair, presented on ResourceSync at the TICER Summer School, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, on August 22, and at the NISO Forum: Tracking it Back to the Source: Managing and Citing Research Data which took place in, Denver on September 24. Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director and the group's co-chair, presented an Introduction to ResourceSync at the Wolfram Data Summit 2012, September 6, in Washington, DC. Simeon Warner of Cornell University will discuss ResourceSync on the November 19, 2012 NISO Open Teleconference call.

Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) Working Group

Co-chairs: John Bodfish (OCLC), Ted Koppel (Auto-Graphics)

SIP New Work Item Proposal

The SIP Working Group roster was recently approved by the Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee. Now the group has begun to meet to discuss its work going forward. The Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP), introduced by 3M in 1993, provides a standard communication mechanism to allow Integrated Library System (ILS) applications and self-service devices to communicate seamlessly to perform self-service transactions. It has become the de facto standard around the world to integrate ILSs and self-service devices.

The SIP working group plans to take the currently existing SIP version 3.0 specification and direct it through the NISO standardization process. The specific goals are still in the process of formulation by the group, but the discussions so far have included the assessment of the current protocol for fitness in the current landscape and discussions with the NCIP Standing Committee to consider how SIP fits with NCIP. The group will be updating its Workroom page with its work plan as soon as that is finalized.