Thought Leader Meetings
NISO convenes Thought Leader meetings with a group of experts on a particular topic to identify potential areas where NISO can lead a standards-based or recommended practice solution to recognized barriers.
In the past, standards work has often been initiated by meetings of key
people working on individual projects who are focused on a particular
specialty, or by practitioners experiencing a common problem. The NISO Blue
Ribbon Panel highlighted this fact, saying that, "NISO's role and decision
making [in choosing which projects to adopt] has been far too reactive and
opportunistic." Furthermore, within the broader context of the strategic
Architectural Framework, which was developed in 2006, the report concluded
that, "it should become easier to strategically plan and structure these
pre-standards activities."
In order to take advantage of such specialists' knowledge and experience,
NISO will be holding "Thought Leader" meetings consisting of 8-12 specialists
who will discuss the current state of affairs on a given issue, assess the
value of the identified topics, and determine the needs that standards might
be able to address. Topic Committees-newly developed organizational
leadership groups within NISO's new standards development structure that are
focused on specific topical areas (currently: Discovery to Delivery, Content
& Collection Management, and Business Information)-will provide support
and leadership for the Thought Leader meetings in each of their areas. In
this role they will provide focus based on the needs of their field and their
experience with and knowledge about the needs of libraries, publishers,
and/or vendors. In addition, NISO's Architecture Committee will hold its own
Thought Leader meeting focused on a topic area where NISO may need to be
engaged but one that is not addressed by the Topic Committees or NISO as of
yet (e.g., e-learning).
The Thought Leaders at each of these meetings will brainstorm a number of the
barriers to broader adoption, acceptance, or use of the topic in the
community. From that list of "pain points," the group will set priorities for
the one or two specific issues surrounding the topic for which a
standard-based solution could move the community forward. The group will then
draft a charge around which a technical working group can be created in order
to explore and develop a standard, recommended practice, schema, or tool that
would address the issue highlighted by the Thought Leaders. In this way, the
Thought Leader meetings set an agenda for future standards development and
educational programs in designated areas and NISO becomes a facilitator to
the library, publisher, and vendor communities in problem solving for
scholarly communications questions.
For example, for the subject of institutional repositories, there are a
number of large issues hindering their progress and broad adoption,
including: simplifying the deposit of information into the repository; the
types and formats of content to be deposited; development of analysis tools;
linking between tables, graphs, and data; preservation and long-term data
migration planning; copyright and intellectual property issues; and
cross-disciplinary or cross-institutional repository coordination and
interoperability. The Thought Leaders would focus on these problems and
prioritize potential solutions. At the end of the day, the group will
determine which one or two specific problems that best be addressed by a
standards-related solution. It will then draft a charge around which NISO
will organize a Technical Working Group
NISO's newly created Education Committee will assist with the planning for
these meetings and particularly with the outreach to the Thought Leader
participants and the development of educational programs and materials
following the meetings. A key consideration in NISO's new strategic direction
has been the need for broader and more frequent outreach and education that
will reach varied audiences, both in terms of types of organization and
levels of knowledge. As such, it is essential that the Education Committee be
an active and engaged partner with the Thought Leader meetings, ready to
coordinate with any newly created working groups in order to promote and plan
programs and/or outreach for the ideas that emerge from this standards
pipeline. Without such follow-up, the concepts taken from the Thought Leader
meetings would be in danger of becoming skewed, uninformed, or simply lost
due to lack of exposure to and input from the broader community.
2008 Meetings
Institutional Repositories Thought Leader Meeting
Date: February 12, 2008
Location: Baltimore, MD
Facilitator: Greg Tanenbaum
Topic Committee: Discovery to Delivery
The final report from this meeting is available.
With significant recent institutional investments in implementing repository software, interoperability is a critical success factor. This is particularly true where the lack of interoperability hinders the use of these systems on the deposit side by the content creators. The struggle between local repository needs and the more global needs for sharing, such as through cross-repository search, continues to be a topic of discussion and heated debate, and could benefit from involvement of not only the producers of institutional repository software, but from the existing standards bodies that currently work in this space. Many issues related to data models and metadata schemas exist, including the huge problem of common encoding schemes for values within those schemas.
Digital Library & Collections Thought Leader Meeting
Date: June 17, 2008
Location: Baltimore, MD
Facilitator: Judy Luther
Topic Committee: Content & Collection Management
The final report from this meeting is available.
Resource management systems that facilitate the delivery of electronic library resources are in their early formative stages. Some experts expect these systems to become the central management tool for all processes and services within libraries, moving the traditional library system to a secondary role. How they coordinate information exchange among publisher and library systems will be important to improving library staff productivity and will be critical to the library's delivery of content to the end user. Much of what will run these systems will entail publisher and library systems interacting on an ongoing machine-to-machine basis. Very valuable work could be done, for example, to document different system requirements in these areas as a basis for discussions of places where proprietary interests may be superseded by standardization needs.
E-Learning & Course Management Systems Thought Leader Meeting
Date: July 16, 2008
Location: Baltimore, MD
Facilitator: October Ivins
Topic Committee: Architecture
A final report from this meeting is available.
Electronic learning and course management systems interact in a variety of ways with library and publisher systems to deliver educational resources to the learning community. How content is delivered to students within these systems, interoperability issues, and automated license expression interactions will be key to broad adoption of e-learning systems. Large commercial entities in this space, as well as open source efforts (for instance, MIT's OpenCourseWare, Moodle, etc.) are building systems and driving many of the standards in an ad hoc manner. Partnerships with other organizations such as IMS Global Learning Consortium will be key to involving all the relevant stakeholders.
Research Data Thought Leader Meeting
Date: October 1, 2008
Location: Baltimore, MD
Facilitator: Maureen C. Kelly
Topic Committee: Business Information
A final report from this meeting is available.
This is a rapidly growing issue not only in government agencies such as NASA, NOAA, and NIH, but also in the biotechnology industry and in the academic environment, where struggles to establish standards for storing and sharing data continue to hinder collaboration and reuse of existing data sets without large investments of time and money. A gathering of key stakeholders from a broad cross-section of government, corporate, and academic organizations will ensure collaborative solutions to mutual problems and might even be able to generate funding from various corporate bodies if the topics discussed are oriented toward their needs.