Co-chairs: Marti Heyman (OCLC); Betty Landesman (University of Baltimore)
Bibliographic Roadmap
NISO Bibliographic Roadmap Initiative
Bibliographic Roadmap New Work Item Proposal
This project grew out of the NISO Bibliographic Roadmap Initiative, work which intends to identify areas where agreement on standard or recommended practices would support better bibliographic data exchange. This working group met as a single bloc for several months to establish common understandings and a proposed roadmap forward, and has now split into several subgroups to address different areas of work:
- Vocabulary Use & Reuse Subgroup, co-chaired by Diane Hillmann of Metadata Management Associates and Daniel Lovins of New York University. This subgroup is determining best practices in policies where vocabularies may be repurposed by organizations who are not the owner or maintainer of the vocabulary.
- Vocabulary Documentation Subgroup, co-chaired by Sean Glover of YBP Library Services and Natalie Bulick of Indiana State University. This subgroup is examining which information about a vocabulary should be documented in order to meet community needs, and is using as input recommendations published by the Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) project.
- Vocabulary Preservation Subgroup, chaired by Sherle Abramson-Bluhm of the University of Michigan. This subgroup is creating recommendations regarding 'orphaned' or abandoned vocabularies and how these might be managed in the short and long term.
The subgroups are contributing use case descriptions to a shared space where all might make use of them, and continuing work on a co-authored draft Recommended Practice which is intended to be released for public comment in the autumn. A Steering Committee oversees the three working groups and ensures coordination of effort across the three areas of focus. This Steering Committee meets monthly and includes the subgroup co-chairs and a liaison to the Content and Collections Management Topic Committee, Marti Heyman of OCLC.
Diane Hillmann presented on this project as part of the NISO Update at ALA Annual in Orlando, FL in June.
NISO STS Working Groups
Co-chairs: Bruce Rosenblum (Inera), Robert Wheeler (American Society of Mechanical Engineers)
NISO STS Work Item
This work will standardize a specific tag set used for standards publishing, the ISO STS, and link it officially to JATS (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015 JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite), a widely used specification which defines a set of XML elements and attributes for tagging journal articles and describes several article models.
At the end of 2011, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) revamped its publishing systems and together with Mulberry Technologies, Inc. developed a derivative of JATS to be used for ISO standards publishing: the ISOSTS (ISO Standard Tag Set). This DTD has been in full production since, with little or no changes. Several US-based and international standards development organizations (SDOs) and distributors in the United States hope to upgrade their publishing systems, but have been reluctant to adopt ISOSTS as it is not currently an official standard. There is also the desire that updates from JATS filter into its "children" tag sets, such as STS.
The NISO STS Working Group consists of two groups consisting of many various SDOs, publishing technology suppliers, and other stakeholders, both co-chaired by Bruce Rosenblum of Inera and Robert Wheeler of ASME, with Mulberry Technologies serving as Secretariat. The NISO STS Steering Group has now completed its work examining overall scope of the effort and setting priorities for development; the NISO STS Technical Group continues to discuss and determine how various approaches could be implemented in the tag set. It is anticipated that a public draft for comment will be produced in the next few months.
Protocol for Exchanging Serial Content (PESC) Working Group
Co-chairs: Leslie Johnston (National Archives and Records Administration), Kimberly Tryka (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
PESC Recommended Practice (NISO RP-23-2015)
The PESC Recommended Practice was published in June 2015. This NISO publication describes a packaging specification to be used for exchange and archiving of serial publications. Many different organizations, such as libraries, archives, indexing services, content aggregators, publishers, and content creators exchange and work with the diverse digital files that comprise serial content. There are many reasons for copies of serial content to be transferred from organization to organization, and even within a single organization, many times during the lifecycle of the content. When exchanging content, the files that comprise a serial "publication" are packaged together in some manner and these packages can be highly variable.
The PESC Recommended Practice offers guidance to members of the scholarly communication community on preferred practices for the packaging and exchange of serial content that will enable the automation of processes to receive and manage serial content at scale. By following these practices, organizations can make it clear what content has been transmitted, how it is organized, and what processing is required when a new package is received.
Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Standing Committee
Co-chairs: Jeff Beck (National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine), B. Tommie Usdin (Mulberry Technologies, Inc.)
JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015)
NISO announced the formal publication of the updated version of JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite 1.1, ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015 in early January 2016. This newly official edition is a revision of ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012, also known as JATS 1.0, first published in July 2012. The purpose of JATS is to define a suite of XML elements and attributes that describes the content of metadata and journal articles using a common format that enables the exchange of journal content. This Tag Suite thus is intended to preserve intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which the content was originally delivered, and enables an archive to capture structural and semantic components of existing material. In addition, the JATS standard includes three implementations of the suite, called Tag Sets, which are intended to provide models for archiving, publishing, and authoring journal article content.
Approved comments from users made on JATS 1.0 through February 2015 were incorporated into JATS 1.1 by the NISO JATS Standing Committee. All changes are also backward compatible with JATS 1.0, which means that any document that was valid according to JATS 1.0 will be valid according to JATS 1.1. The Standing Committee invites further comments to be considered for future updates of JATS which will be considered using its Continuous Maintenance procedure. JATS-Con 2016 took place in early April in Bethesda, MD, and naturally included many presentations discussing various aspects of JATS and its use.