NISO Publishes Recommended Practice on Presentation and Identification of E-Journals

A new NISO Recommended Practice: PIE-J: Presentation & Identification of E-Journals (NISO RP-16-2013) was published in March. This Recommended Practice was developed to provide guidance on the presentation of 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, collections, and electronic resources librarians.

In addition to the recommendations, the document includes extensive examples of good practices using screenshots from various publishers' online journals platforms; a discussion of helpful resources for obtaining title history and ISSN information; an overview of the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and key points for using it correctly; an explanation of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI®), the registration agency CrossRef, and tips on using DOIs for journal title management; and a review of related standards and recommended practices.

The PIE-J Recommended Practice and a brochure summarizing the recommendations are available from the NISO PIE-J workroom website.

NISO Publishes Recommended Practice for Institutional Identification

NISO announces the publication of a new Recommended Practice on Institutional Identification: Identifying Organizations in the Information Supply Chain. This Recommended Practice describes the work done by the NISO Institutional Identifier (I²) Working Group to define the requirements for a standard identifier for institutional identification in the supply chain. It also provides background on the collaboration agreement between the NISO I² Working Group and the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) International Agency to use the ISNI standard (ISO 27729) and the ISNI-IA's infrastructure for institutional identification, rather than publish a separate standard for institutions.

The Institutional Identification: Identifying Organizations in the Information Supply Chain Recommended Practice is available for free download from the NISO I² workroom webpage.

Mellon Grant Awarded to NISO to Encode E-Resource License Templates in ONIX-PL

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the National Information Standards Organization a grant to support the encoding of a collection of template licenses for e-resources into the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format for deposit into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing, and library systems community. The deposited encodings—made available under a Creative Commons Public Domain (CC-0) license—will allow libraries that license electronic content to import the template licenses into their own electronic resource management systems for further local customization and implementation. The project will also fund some publicly available training resources that will inform community members on how to use those encodings for their own purposes.

JISC Collections, a division of the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) that manages electronic content acquisitions for member institutions of higher learning in the UK, has already encoded all of the licenses for JISC Collections-subscribed content and deposited them in their KnowledgeBase Plus (KB+) database. While KB+ has proven a useful tool for institutions in the UK, it has not moved beyond this venue because the encodings produced by the JISC Collections are restricted to JISC members' usage. To encourage ONIX-PL adoption, JISC Collections is providing $10,000 in funding support for the project to provide training in the encoding format and the ONIX-PL Editing software.

NISO has contracted with Selden Lamoureux to obtain the template licenses, encode them in ONIX-PL format, and deposit the files in the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebases. The Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) is an element of the larger Kuali OLE initiative to provide open source management systems to the library and academic communities. Much like the success that the KB+ project has had in the UK, the GOKb project has the potential to advance the state of library encodings in the broader library community, once this project's encodings have been deposited.

To ensure the use of these encodings and ongoing sustainability of the project, NISO will be producing at least four recorded 60-to-90-minute video training sessions. The training will show librarians how to export a template license from GOKb+, import it into an ERM system, and customize the template match an organization's specific license terms. Some training will be directed towards publishers, explaining how to encode using ONIX-PL and deposit those encodings into GOKb and KB+. The training materials will be available from the NISO website under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY).

More information about the project will be available on the NISO website shortly.

ISQ Spring 2013 Issue Now Available on the NISO Website

The Spring 2013 issue of NISO's Information Standards Quarterly magazine, providing a summary of the 2012 standards development work conducted by NISO and by the international ISO Information and Documentation committee (TC46) has been published in open access on the NISO website. NISO provides this Year in Review issue on an annual basis to keep readers apprised of all the accomplishments of our community in the past year.

The Spring issue also contains a standard spotlight article on the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), a new standard based on an older specification, originally developed at the National Library of Medicine. Also included in the issue is the annual reference listing of all of NISO's published standards, recommended practices, and technical reports.

Information Standards Quarterly is available electronically in open access from the NISO website. The magazine is also available in print format by subscription or in print on demand.

April Webinars on Universal Accessibility and Deployment of RDA

The first NISO educational program in April will be held on April 10 to discuss Universal Accessibility: Creating E-Books Anyone Can Read. One of the exciting aspects of e-books and the newer standards for them is the ability content creators have to create a format that provides for accessibility for everyone. From individuals who are visually impaired to those that have cognitive or learning disabilities, all can all be accommodated with the latest dizzying array of devices that support a variety of functionality and multimedia. In this webinar you will learn about new and emerging technologies to provide universal accessibility, including built-in accessibility for textbooks and an open source platform. Speakers will address Emerging Technologies for the Visually Impaired (Anne Taylor, Director of Access Technology, National Federation for the Blind), Built-in Access for Digital Textbooks (Michele Bruno, Program Manager, Accessibility, Cengage Learning), and an Introduction to the Readium-based accessible Bookshare Web Reader (Ginny Grant, Product Manager, Benetech).

More information and registration is available from the event webpage.

The second webinar, to be held on April 24, is a joint NISO/DCMI webinar on Deployment of RDA (Resource Description and Access) Cataloging and its Expression as Linked Data. Speakers Alan Danskin and Gordon Dunsire will take stock of progress towards developing application profiles based on RDA and discuss the practicalities of exposing RDA-based data in the linked data cloud.

More information and registration is available from the event webpage.

April Virtual Conference: EPUB3 and the Future of Interoperable E-books: What Libraries Need to Know

Virtual conferences are new type of educational event that NISO is offering this year. These six-hour conferences are held online in webinar-like formats, with occasional breaks in the schedule for participants. The longer length allows the depth of coverage of a conference coupled with the convenience of a webinar.

NISO's second virtual conference of the year will be held on April 17 on the topic of EPUB3 and the Future of Interoperable E-books: What Libraries Need to Know. EPUB3 is a standard for interoperable e-books that is rapidly being adopted by the publishing and device manufacturing community. It has the promise of allowing publishers to create a single file format that can be rendered on any reading device, such as an e-reader, tablet, laptop, smartphone, etc. This will be a critical component of a library's e-book services, since libraries must be in a position to serve patrons who come in with a range of devices, not simply from one particular supplier. Understanding the e-book files and why EPUB will allow a broader range of fulfilling patron needs is something that both publishers and librarians need to understand. Join us for a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of EPUB3, suggested tools for implementation, barrier issues on the horizon, and the significant improvements in accessibility with EPUB.

An excellent line-up of speakers will describe EPUB3, its implementation and implications, and the future of EPUB. More information, a detailed agenda, and registration are available on the event webpage.

May Webinars on Open Access Content and Semantic Mashups

The first NISO educational program in May will be held on May 8 on the topic of Taking Full Advantage: Discovery of Open Access Content. The publication and management of Open Access material now plays a central role in the academic research infrastructure, although its impact may differ across disciplines. If, as Heather Joseph of SPARC has written in College and Research Library News, "the full accessibility and utility of articles is a critical part of the design of the research system," then how can the library ensure that this material, which may be generated via an array of various processes from multiple sources, is easily available for its patrons to discover and use? Join NISO's presenters for a lively discussion on this timely topic.

More information and registration is available from the event webpage.

The second webinar, to be held on May 22, is a joint NISO/DCMI webinar on Semantic Mashups Across Large, Heterogeneous Institutions: Experiences from the VIVO Service. VIVO is a semantic web application focused on discovering researchers and research publications in the life sciences. This webinar, presented by John Fereira, a veteran at the Albert R. Mann Library Information Technology Services department at Cornell where the VIVO project was born, presents the perspective of a software developer on the practicalities of building a high-quality semantic-web search service on existing data maintained in dozens of formats and software platforms at large, diverse institutions. The talk will highlight services that leverage the Semantic Web platform in innovative ways, e.g., for finding researchers based on the text content of a particular Web page and for visualizing networks of collaboration across institutions.

More information and registration is available from the event webpage.

New on the NISO Website

• Draft Agenda, Bibliographic Roadmap Meeting, April 15-16, 2013 in Baltimore


• Presentation slides from March 6 NISO Webinar: Evolving Trends in Collection Development Part 1: New Models for Journal Article Access


• Presentation slides from March 13 NISO Webinar: Evolving Trends in Collection Development Part 2: Putting the User in the Driver's Seat


• Recording from March 11 Open Teleconference on NISO/NFAIS Supplemental Journal Article Materials Recommended Practice


• Slides from Todd Carpenter's presentation on Standards Issues Related to Moving Content Off the Page at Goportis Conference on Non-Textual Information, March 13, 2013


• New workroom webpage for Open Access Metadata and Indicators project


• New workroom webpage for Journal Article Version – Addendum project

ANSI/AIIM 25: 2012, Assessing Trusted Systems for Compliance with Industry Standards and Best Practices

The scope of this industry standard is to identify activities and operations an organization shall perform in order to evaluate whether the electronically stored information is maintained in reliable and trustworthy Enterprise Content (or Records) Management ECM (also referenced as EDMS, ERM, ERMS) systems.

Book Industry Study Group, Updated BIC-to-BISAC Subject Codes Mapping

This updated BIC-to-BISAC mapping incorporates the 2012 edition of the BISAC Subject Headings and the BIC Subject Categories and Qualifiers Scheme, version 2.1. The mapping is available as part of the complete BISAC Subject Headings end-user package.

ISO/IEC 15961-1:2013, Information technology – Radio frequency identification (RFID) for item management: Data protocol – Part 1: Application interface

ISO/IEC 15961-1:2013 focuses on the abstract interface between an application and the data processor, and includes the specification and definition of application commands and responses. It allows data and commands to be specified in a standardized way, independent of the particular air interface of ISO/IEC 18000.

Ministry of Culture and Communication (France), GINCO

The GINCO free software is dedicated to the management of vocabularies. It implements the principles defined in the ISO standard 25964-1:2011, Information and documentation – Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies – Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval. GINCO is released under the terms of the CeCiLL v2 license.

Readium.org Launches Open Source Foundation, EPUB 3 SDK Project

The Readium.org open source initiative announced its evolution into a formal consortium of member companies fostering a community of open source projects for digital publishing. Also unveiled was a new Readium SDK project to develop an EPUB 3 rendering engine optimized for native apps on tablets and other devices.

What do Data Services Librarians Do?
Journal of eScience Librarianship, 2012, 1 (3); by Elaine R. Martin

Martin reviews the articles appearing in this first issue of the new Journal of eScience Librarianship and cites data services as an excellent opportunity for librarians to connect and collaborate with researchers in their organizations. Roles may involve dataset archiving and curation, adding metadata descriptions, assisting with NSF data management plans. Merce Crosas' article discusses the Dataverse Network used for curating social science data. Raboin, Rezni-Zellen, and Salo review their separate institutions' experience in provide data management and concur that this can be a successful service for librarians to offer. Adamick's project at U-Mass Amherst focused on supporting graduate students with workshops on data management. Ferguson's article describes the challenges encountered in managing the data created by molecular biology laboratory equipment including inconsistent file formats, naming conventions, and data handling practices. Schroeder encountered similar issues and cites this as "an opportunity for librarians through their development of standards, protocols, and vocabularies." Gaudette and Kafel also identify problems with inconsistent lab practices as well as challenges in managing print lab notebooks. All of these authors provide a window into the tasks performed by data librarians. A few schools are beginning to offer formal programs, which Steinhart and Qin review, along with the use of mentoring as a learning tool. The new directive for federal agencies with more than $100 million in R&D spending to make their research freely available and to manage their digital data. "This is a potential game changer for academic librarians offering data services to the scientists and researchers in their institutions." (Link to Web Source)

Re-Discovering and Linking Metadata in Viewshare: An Interview with Jeremy Myntti
The Digital Signal, March 29, 2013; by Abbey Potter

Jeremy Myntti's presentation at ALA Midwinter described his experience in using Viewshare to create a "view" of metadata from the Western Soundscape Archive, which contains audio recordings of animals in the western regions of the U.S. Viewshare provides the opportunity to display the data in pie charts, maps, tag clouds, timelines, and photo galleries. The presentation slides illustrate the process Myntti used to manipulate the metadata, import it into Viewshare, and augment it, e.g. with latitude/longitude for places. Lessons learned include the usefulness of conducting a metadata audit to identify what's missing, locate inconsistencies, that it isn't that hard to use existing data in new ways, and that we shouldn't be afraid of getting involved with linked data. With Viewshare, new ways of discovering and interacting with the archive's information was made possible and could potentially attract new and different users. Myntti would like to see Viewshare add functionality for hierarchical browsing, editing the data from within Viewshare, and integrating with CONTENTdm for automatic updating of the common metadata. (Link to Web Source)

The Future Of Publishing: A New Page
Nature special issue, March 28, 2013, #495

Publishing is in a turmoil dealing with the changes from cloud computing, sharing, open access, and the government mandates for research availability. This special issue of Nature explores these issues through articles that: claim cost savings from the author-pays model; explain the inner workings of the open access model; using open licensing; how some open access publishers are scamming authors; and how researchers can decide the best place to publish. Jason Priem predicts an algorithmic filter that will replace peer review and new tools for real-time publishing. Richard Monastersky shows how libraries such as Johns Hopkins are moving into the arena of data curation and management. And Robert Danton talks about the forthcoming Digital Public Library of America. (Link to Web Source)

Is It Time for Scholarly Journal Publishers to Begin Distributing Articles Using EPUB 3?
The Scholarly Kitchen, March 19, 2013; by Todd A Carpenter

The EPUB 3 specification offers publishers a single-format distribution for e-books with the potential for streamlining their creation and distribution. But the use of the specification is not limited to monographs, which is why it is called "EPUB" rather than "EBOOK". Features in version 3 of the specification support fixed layout multimedia, MathML, accessibility, and other functions that would be of value to many types of publications. Adoption of EPUB 3 has been modest so far, partly due to the limited number of reading devices that support it. And it is not a serious contender as yet in journal publishing, even though most journals are now delivered electronically. Scholarly journal consumption on handheld devices is not common, although tablets and improved apps could change this trend. Most electronic journals are read on web platforms or offer downloadable PDF files. A few publishers have experimented with previous versions of EPUB and BioMed Central has announced it will begin using EPUB 3 for some titles. The use of PDFs in a device-driven world has many problems including the problem of replicating a fixed page on various screen sizes; the limitations on embedded images, links and metadata (or the poor use of these features by publishers); lack of interactivity; and issues of accessibility for the print-disabled (due to improper formatting or use of PDF's features in this area). Growth in multimedia content has been slow but could be a driving force for the use of EPUB. While EPUB 3 supports MathML, only 14 of 40 systems identified in the BISG EPUB 3 Support Grid fully support it. Converting from an XML workflow to EPUB should not be cost prohibitive, as described in a paper about converting a Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) format to EPUB. Content produced in HTML will be even easier to transition as EPUB 3 is HTML5 in a wrapper. Although web distribution of scholarly journals is here to stay, publishers should seriously be looking at replacing PDF formats with EPUB for offline reading—sooner rather than later. Most publishers who make this move will likely be driven by the need to use the advanced features supported in EPUB 3. Publishers who are moving to HTML5 for mobile or app-based distribution could easily package such a file in EPUB for offline viewing. "Journal publishers should seriously consider moving in that direction, since the costs and risks are relatively low and the opportunities opened up are substantial." (Link to Web Source)