At the American Library Association conference this weekend, I’ll be part of a panel presentation from the LITA Emerging Technologies Interest Group with the title “What Is Your Library Doing about Emerging Technologies?” The presentation will be on Saturday, June 26 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm in room 103B of the Washington Convention Center. The publicity blurb:

A new job title of “Emerging Technology Librarian” seems to reflect an awareness among today’s libraries that there is a need for a librarians whose main role is to explore, evaluate, promote, and implement various emerging technologies. 19 librarians in different fields of librarianship at academic, school, and public libraries will discuss the topic of emerging technologies at libraries, their evaluation, implementation, adoption, and management challenges.

My panel group met by conference call this afternoon to discuss the topic, and I came away feeling great about the synergy of this group. The panel style is the panelists responding to a question from the moderator and reactions from each other with time for questions from the audience. No canned presentations!

Thanks to Bohyun Kim from Florida International University for setting up the panel discussion.

Earlier this week, LITA announced its unconference event: LITACamp. The meeting is scheduled for May 7-8, 2009 at the OCLC Conference Center in Dublin, Ohio.

(Map of conference center and surrounding facilities.)

For those that don’t know, the unconference meeting format is one where the topics are picked by those that show up, and those that show up play an active role in creating the meeting. Other than the two keynotes (Joan Frye Williams and John Blyberg) the schedule of meetings is created by the will of the group present at the time.

Cost varies by standing in LITA/ALA ($150 for LITA members, $210 for ALA members, and $290 for non-ALA members). This registration fee includes a light breakfast on both days and a lunch on Thursday, plus free WiFi at the conference center. The meeting site has more information.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/litacamp/index.cfm on July 13th, 2011.

Download iCal file

Saturday, January 12th from 1:30pm to 3:30pm — j2kIG Meeting at Chestnut room in the Radisson Plaza hotel

The JPEG2000 Interest Group of LITA will be holding a business meeting to discuss plans for a program at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim in June. Anyone with an interest in the use of JPEG2000 in Archives and Libraries is welcome to attend the meeting, whether or not you are a member of LITA.

Agenda

1. Finalize plans for program at ALA Annual in Anaheim
2. Interest group renewal and solicitation for an IG chair
3. Information sharing about projects, issues, successes/failures

Proposed ALA Annual Program Details

Proposed Program Title: Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000

Program Restrictions (i.e., speaker date restrictions, conflict times, etc.): None at this time

Program Day and Time:

Tentative Program Description (75 words or less): The topic is surrounding the use of JPEG2000 as an archival format. Part of the presentation would be on the use of JPEG2000 as an archival format, timed to follow the release of an in-depth study on this topic by Stephen Abrahams, Stephen Chapman, and John Kuntz for the IS&T conference in the fall. Participants in the IG meeting would like to see this perspective balanced with a speaker offering considerations on why one should choose not to adopt the standard. Another part of the program would be on the process for considering the adoption of the JPEG2000 file format in practice, perhaps someone from the Library of Congress related to the NDNP project. A third component of the program would be from a vendor and/or open source tool user on the available toolsets and what to consider when adopting the new file format. [This more extensive description is offered in leu of an in-person meeting with PPC. It will be trimmed for the published program copy.]

Target Audience and Estimated Size: Digital library practitioners, archivists; approximately 150-200 in attendance

Possible program track (identify 1, 2 and 3 choices):
1st choice: Digital Information & Technologies
Subtrack: n/a
2nd choice: Transformation & Innovations
Subtrack: n/a
3rd choice: Collection Management & Technical Services
Subtrack: Digital Collection Development

[Aside: I'm not quite sure what the procedure is for posting on LITAblog.org. This report was posted there last night to appear at something like http://www.litablog.org/2007/06/23/standards-ig/ but it seems to be stuck in a moderation queue of some sort. I'm reposting it here to get it out to the membership.

Update 20070625T0943 : It was posted as http://www.litablog.org/2007/06/24/standards-ig/.]

Todd Carpenter, NISO’s new Managing Director (since September 2006) gave a talk about the new NISO organization that has evolved out of the recommendations from the 2005 “Blue Ribbon Panel” that reviewed the organization. He started by reiterating facts and perceptions about NISO — that it is the agency responsible for ANSI Z39 standards and the ANSI representative to the ISO TC46; that standards formation under NISO is a long, arduous process measured in years; that NISO has been reactive to situations within the community and has not been engaged in the incubation or early development of standardization efforts; and that it is focused on internal communities (libraries) rather than engagement with other groups and industries with similar needs to libraries.

NISO status

NISO is taking a much broader focus on standards related activities that was previously conceived. NISO will certainly continue to maintain a portfolio of Z39.xx standards and participation in ISO standard efforts, but it is now envisioned that there can be other types of outputs/solutions: recommended practice documents; tools, plugins, or web services definitions; white papers investigating and educating on new technologies; registries in support of identifiers and other processes; and creation of “living documents” such as wiki sites (with an editorial board). He highlighted the difference of two recent standards efforts (SUSHI and SEUR) as compared to the traditional ANSI standards process: incubation of draft standard in months rather than years (SUSHI – 13 months, SERU – 9 months) with draft standards for organizations to trial, test, and iteratively improve leading from concept to final approval in less than two years. (“Final approval” in this case is a majority vote of NISO members, not the full consensus needed for an ANSI Z39-track standard.)

The Strategic Framework

The framework divides the world into three components. The first is “activities” (what an organization is doing) with these categories: Discovery to Delivery; Collection Management; Space-connecting (getting physical things from one place to another); Business intelligence (statistics and such); and management and policy. The second component is “entities” (what is being acted upon) with these categories: people; information object; collections; organizations; and services. The third is purpose of the standard with these categories: identification (what is being talked about); formats and structures (what is is and how it is constructed); transactions (how a process occurs); and policy. Todd offered Z39.50 as an example of how a standard can be placed in this framework: the activity is “discovery to delivery” of “collections” as entities with the purpose of defining a transactional format.

New Organizational Structure

Working groups are structured much as they were before — doing the actual standards making. In between the working groups and the Architecture Committee are new Topic Committees. Each topic committee is aligned with the “activities” in the framework, and has these responsibilities: management of a portfolio of standards; coordination of the reaffirmation process for existing standards; and leadership in the strategic expansion of standards within the area of expertise.

One way Topic Committees will proactively explore areas of standardization needs within an area of focus is through meetings of “Thought Leaders.” Each topic committee will organize one or two meetings a year of eight to 12 key specialists to explore the state of the art in a particular topic area. The thought leaders will review the core issues and “points of pain” then priorities these issues based on the viability of solving or substantially improving the situation within 18 months, given current technology and “cultural” environments. After selecting the most pressing issue to pursue, the thought leaders then describe what a solution would look like and draft a charge for working group (including timeline, expected reporting, and anticipated outcomes) along with potential working group participants. This information is reported back to the Topic Committee and NISO. The outcome of the working group could be a standards- or recommended practice-based solution. Todd emphasized that participation in the thought leader meeting will not necessarily imply service on the working group. The initial series of thought leader meetings will revolve around institutional repositories, digital libraries and digital collections, electronic learning systems and digital information, and research data.

Updated Infrastructure and Outreach Efforts

The final area of focus for NISO is in outreach, education and training about standards. In particular, educational programming is a key aspect of outreach to the community. It fosters the adoption and application of standards as well as enhances the development process by providing an opportunity for the community to be engaged in the standards development efforts. These efforts also generate revenue to support the organization. The events will take the form of roving presentations at venues around the country and use of ‘webinars’ for quick, in-depth exploration of a technical area. Todd notes that while there is a great deal of individual participation in NISO activities (committee and working group membership, etc.) that there is not a lot of “organizational” participation. Member libraries make up only one-third of voting membership and the Library Standards Alliance program has only 27 members. He sees that library consortia may represent a way to pool the efforts of individual libraries to support the standards development process.

Minutes of the JPEG2000 Interest Group have been posted to the j2kArcLib.info website. Comments there are restricted to registered users of the site (although registration is freely available), so feel free to post comments here.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://j2karclib.info/node/113 on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://j2karclib.info/j2kIG on January 19th, 2011.

At the meeting we will be sharing observations and experiences with JPEG 2000 for access and preservation of still and moving pictures as well as discussing ideas for advocacy and spreading information. Membership in LITA is not required to attend the meeting. Get this meeting as an iCal file suitable for importing into most calendar programs.

38.9077° by -77.0353°

The text was modified to remove a link to http://j2karclib.info/j2kig on January 19th, 2011.

Tom Wilson, LITA past president and all-around insightful LITA Top Technology Trendster, posted a commentary to the “Where have all the programmers gone?” post that deserves top billing ¹. Please read and digest it before coming back here. And it’s not late to the party at all, Tom — I believe it is only now just getting interesting.

As you pointed out, my observations were not intended to denigrate the choices made by our elders. They stepped up and built complex systems that needed to be specialized to library data management tasks because there was nothing else around for them to use. And the complexity of those systems meant countless hours of library staff engaged with patrons to mediate their search requests (at first) and then to teach them how to use the interfaces (as the users became more sophisticated and the interfaces simpler). Now I would argue that at this point, roughly the late 80s and early 90s, the profession as a whole got locked into this “mediated-or-instruction-needed” mindset from which we have yet to recover. I am also drawing the correlation, perhaps incorrectly so, of the technology transfer that occurred during this time of talent from large research libraries to corporate entities that supply us with the automation systems we now rely on. Or, as you put it more eloquently at the start of this quotation:

It is not productive to fault our fore fathers/mothers in libraryland for what happened in this regard. BUT it laid a foundation of thinking that remains a huge burden today. That is: that all library applications are specialized.

It is in the second and third sentence that I think we agree: the mindset at the core of the profession right now that library applications are specialized applications is a huge burden impeding our progress. And while I’ll agree that there is a mindset in the profession that needs to change, I am not convinced that a) libraries (big and small) as organizations have the creative programming talent capacity now as individual entities to capitalize on any sea-change of foundational thinking of the profession; and b) libraries (big and small) as organizations cannot look to the existing “library automation” vendors as the primary providers of solutions in a newly reconstituted vision of “what is the library.”

Addressing the first point, with rare exceptions I don’t see institutions as organizations scaling up their technical staff to handle the raw building tasks of the kinds of services we’d like to see in a reconstituted vision of the library. I do see some evidence that progress is being made here and there, but there are no large programming shops being built to create the next ILS-equivalent. (Side note: I hereby apologize for the connotations created by the phrase “next ILS-equivalent” — that phrase makes sense to me on the surface but it causes deep shudderings in my bones.) I have come to believe, though, that tools and techniques from the open source world can be used to aggregate the capabilities resident in the distributed “libraryland” to share the risk and reward of the next ILS-equivalent (damn — I used it again). I wrote about that earlier in an open letter to adherents to Christensen’s philosophies called Aggregation of Risk in Pursuit of Disruptive Technologies (comments on that post are still welcome to as we move forward in Ohio with the concepts outline there). Also, a colleague from Ohio State and I co-authored an article for the SmartClassroom newsletter of Campus Technology about “betting your career” on open source that I think will have relevance here. The article is to be published on the 19th and I’ll post a copy on DLTJ after a seven-day embargo.

Addressing the second point, it is my assertion, under Christensen’s theories, that “library automation vendors” are not going to be the source of the disruptive innovation that we need. Like the library organizations themselves, they are caught up in the sustaining technology cycle that has lead us to the position we are in today. I would also assert that it is the libraries, not the vendors, that are on firmer footing to break the cycle for the the exact “ideal driven” reasons you cite. Or, to apply Christensen’s model, the vendor’s values/resources/processes triad will drive them harder to continue the sustaining technology cycle — more so than a library organization’s values/resources/processes triad that includes “ideal driven” components.

All-in-all, though, this is going to be an exciting thing to watch over the next couple of years. Hope to continue the conversation and the mutual education….

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litaresources/toptechtrends/toptechnology.htm on June 9th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. For those that have not yet encountered this idiom, “top billing” is a motion picture industry term that refers to actors whose names appear first in credits. They are usually in the principle performers and typically have the most screen time in the film. Read more in Wikipedia

This is a summary of the discussion of the LITA Library Consortia / Automated Systems Interest Group meeting on Monday morning of the ALA Annual Convention in New Orleans. The meeting consisted of a managed discussion of the use of Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems in consortial environments. In some cases, comments from the two primary speakers and discussion among the commingled and unattributed. Inaccuracies and comments taken out of context are the responsibility of the author of this posting, and corrections or embellishments are welcome in the form of comments to this post or as private e-mail messages.

The first speaker was from Yale (unfortunately, I arrived late and didn’t get her name — a helpful hint in a comment to this posting would be appreciated). Yale purchased and “implemented” (actually getting any ERM system up and running is not a trivial task, so it is hard to say when “implemented” is) Verde about 14 months ago when it was in alpha development. Ex Libris delivered a production version to Yale in September 2005 and from them until two weeks ago Yale has been working through configuration and getting an the electronic journal coverage load into the ERM system to know what they have(“took quite a while to get there”). Next they will be migrating information about which databases and e-books they have, followed by data entry for subscription, license, and administrative information for all records in the system. They will probably set up these data entry projects with three different groups, one for each metadata type, operating concurrently.

Yale’s ILS is Endeavor Voyager. They looked at Endeavor’s Meridian and Innovative’s ERMS in addition to Verde. ERMS, although it was in production, was less attractive because it would add third vendor in their automation mix. A major part of their selection process came down to which of their existing systems needed to be more closely integrated with the ERM, and they decided it was more important to be more closely aligned with their existing SFX and Metalib implementations that with the ILS. Yale’s systems department thinks they will be able to pull read-only acquisitions information from the Voyager system via a custom ‘report’ function using the purchase order number as a key. Yale is not putting print serial information into Verde. (Verde has the capability to create a “print record” for a “work” (e.g. bibliographic record).) They have an automated lookup from SFX to their ILS that the user can use to find information about print subscriptions.

The second speaker was Diane Carol from the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU). They have an Innovative Interfaces ILS and because of existing consortial arrangements, had no choice but to use ERMS from Innovative. Prior to implementing an ERM system, they used things like the 856 fields in the ILS to point to electronic journals plus an external SQL/ColdFusion database for public users and spreadsheets for administrative information, license information, and statistics. At one point they were trying to maintain holdings in five or six systems (above plus Ovid, PubMed, etc.) In 2003 they decided to integrate the information about electronic products into one place. This single source of data would be used to upload to other systems and OpenURL resolves, allow wider access to the license data, and centralize the collection development decisions.

Information from their old coverage database (ISSN, URLs, and Holdings) was loaded and attached to a resource records. ISSN connected it to the existing bibliographic record in the ILS. Also has a license record that is also attached to the resource record. Doing things this way created “skeletal records” for resource records — the minimal of what is needed to start loading the system. Because OHSU is part of a consortial union catalog, doing this added a lot of brief records in the union catalog; they are now looking at the process needed to clean this up. OHSU’s OpenURL resolver is Innovative’s WebBridge, and coverage data is automatically updated.

Helpful Hints

Yale started by walking through the DLF ERMI data dictionary to determine what fields they wanted to use what values to put in those fields (e.g. establishing standard terminology), but found it very different when they started the data load and thinking about how they would use it. For instance, does one need to record in the ERM the state of where the license will be adjudicated? If it isn’t part of reporting needs or a public display, then don’t bother. (One can always look it up later out of the paper files.) In other words, don’t create a “high bar” for the initial implementation by thinking that you will fill every field of every record.

If you already have a link resolver and/or a metasearch engine from a vendor other than that of your ILS, decide whether you need tighter integration with the link resolver/metasearch engine or the ILS and have that weight your selection criteria. For instance, Yale reports that Verde can eliminate some duplicative data entry — information entered into Verde can be pushed into SFX. SFX can also be configured to look up permissions, license rights, and technical information in Verde (an “i” information button in SFX). However, from the same vendor, Metalib is not talking to Verde in any way; it is a concern of Yale for when they start to record database information into Verde. Yale is seeking from Ex Libris a best practice for data entry now to be prepared for the day when the integration is done. The general observation of the group was that institutions tend to go with their link resolver product vendor versus their ILS vendor.

To pay attention

Implementation is done for Verde 2.0, documentation done on July 1, early adopters are using the software, public demonstration sites are ready, general release date announcement coming soon. Verde 2.0 has some new features for consortia. Although it not available yet, it is still useful to have their 1.1 implementation to start addressing how the consortium will deal with the definition of fields and how they will be used across the consortium.

What follows is a summary and commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting at ALA annual conference in New Orleans on 25-Jun-2006. What I’ve tried to do is collate comments from the panel members and add my own commentary (marked off as such from the rest of the summary) where I thought I had something useful to add. It is my hope that this summary is a faithful representation of the statements made by the participants in the panel. If not, please let me know privately or in the comment area here and I will make the appropriate corrections on the body of the blog post.

Please note that this is not intended to be a complete summary of the comments of the panelists; in some cases I forgot to write things done, in other cases what was said didn’t fit neatly into this collated set of topics. For a more complete accounting of the topics, please see Karen Coombs’ and Michelle Boule LITA Top Technology Trends postings.

Evolution and Interim Solutions

As a profession, we need establish a collective mindset that “everything we do is an interim solution.” When our perspective is that of managing interim solutions, we begin to describe our activities with the language and context of interim solutions — that this is work not completed. For instance, faceted browsing is not the solution. Its adoption is part of an iterative process. (Tom Wilson) There is lots of experimentation in the arena of “next generation” OPACs and interfaces — navigation, scope of OPAC content, consolidation of purchased and subscribed content — and none of them are “good enough” to be long-term solutions. (Marshall Breeding) And if our gaze rests solely on the OPAC, we are in trouble. The catalog is but one source of information about library content yet it receives the lion’s share of attention and effort. (Roy Tennant)

Approaching change with the mindset of managing interim solutions will encourage flexibility and more experimentation. I agree with these statements, and I think we need to be prepared to move a little more nimbly in the coming years. Perhaps not at “internet speed” — we have firm roots in sound practices — but certainly no longer at, say, “committee speed.”

Research in information retrieval is now being explored by those that are not in our profession. We are no longer the landlords of the information space that we were before (but perhaps we can reclaim some of it through a lease-back arrangement). (Andrew Pace)

My recent trip to JCDL brought this home. The “joint” of JCDL is, by the way, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE’s Computer Section — nary a “library organization” in sight for this “digital library” conference. There is top-notch information retrieval experiments and practices being explored here…stuff that we could apply or consider applying to our own systems.

There has been lots of consolidation in the business side of the library automation industry, but it is still fragmented and more consolidation will be coming. The future will have fewer companies and probably a fewer number of hopefully better products. The large automation companies are outsourcing development and integration of some modules, particularly for ERM functions (to companies such as Serials Solution and TDnet). (Marshal Breeding)

The has also been the rise of “managed” open source. Some open source has an audience that is wide enough to be community-maintained (the Apache web server, for instance). For applications of a more limited interest, companies are making it their buisiness to provide support for open source software (IndexData and others). (Karen Schneider) One example in particular, the field of Institutional Repositories was initially open source, but this capability is now being marketed as a complimentary part of an ILS. This puts institutional repository capabilities into the hands of more institutions. (Clifford Lynch)

Focus on the Service Aspects

The results of the mass-digitization efforts will change library operations. What is the role of library if everyone has content on their gizmo? Our role must be to provide services on that content. (Eric Morgan)

Faceted Browsing

NCSU’s Endeca-enabled catalog is part of a long-term strategy for improving access to the items in the catalog; is is not the end. (Andrew Pace) Any decent search engine in 2006 will have this capability. Faceted navigation does a good job at marrying the search and browse modalities. (Karen Schneider)

Findability as a Service

The recent focus on “findability” is very healthy and the dissatisfaction of the library catalog is part of a reorientation to better serve the user. (Karen Schneider) Software for faceted browsing and personalization has reached a commodity status. Automatic classification and subject assignment and natural language processing are the first part of the last mile. (Andrew Pace)

Along with this has to be the realization that the OPAC is not the center of the library universe; other services are of equal importance to the users. Users with full-text expectations are coming to our metadata universe. And for them, tutorials, screen captures, and desktop movies are not going to cut it. (Karen Schneider)

Karen has a new twist on the “librarians like to search, users like to find” axiom. Our users new expect content — not pointers to the content — to be at the end of their finding process. And increasingly they are familiar with finding modalities coming out of the web-as-a-whole and will not sit through a bibliographic instruction session or watch a “screen cast” (movie of desktop capture) to learn how to use a new service. Think Jacob Nielson here — if everyone is doing it a certain way, you probably should, too, regardless of the fact that you mike know a better way to do it.

At the same time we see the breakdown of barriers to publication — with blogging and wiki software, anyone can be a publisher. Along with the benefit of the capability for everyone to publish, we have the detriment of everyone being a publisher. Should the library offer a filtering and selection service for this content? (Roy Tennant)

I can’t remember the exact context of Roy’s mention of this, but it seems that we should be offering this kind of sorting and filtering service of the “unwashed” blog and wiki content so it is inter-filed with selected and vetted content from our commercially-produced collections. That would be a service to our users, I think.

Actionability as a Service

Eric was talking fast, and so not all of the actions he mentioned are listed above. I can’t remember if one of the actions he listed as “excerpt”. Technology has made it easy to excerpt and recombine pieces of content into a new work and the users have taken advantage of this capability — they call it a “mash-up.” As we put content online we need to bring along the enabling technologies that allow it to be excerpted — when appropriate — and track back the provenance of that excerpted content.

Publishing Platform as a Service

Web pages created in the form of blogs and wikis are becoming the norm rather than the exception. How do we think about of these sorts of things? Content is married to the software and underlying database, and it will be difficult to migrate these things forward. (Eric Morgan) The rise of community sistes (collectively, systems like Flickr, MySpace, GMail, etc.) increases the confusion between services for sharing versus services for preservation. “Over the next few months this lesson will be driven home.” (Clifford Lynch)

This is a concern of mine as well, particularly with the conflicting value systems of the entities in question. As corporate bodies, accountable to venture capital firms or shareholders, will sustain a service as long as the business model is profitable. When it is no longer profitable, what happens to the content on those systems? These corporate bodies also seem to be relying — again — on revenue from advertising to sustain their activities. Despite the success of Google in reviving this method of moving money around cyberspace, do we really think that advertising-supported sites will continue indefinitely?

And everyone is publishing, with resulting decreases in this think we call “privacy.” Teenagers are now being councled that what they put in Facebook will follow them for the rest of their life. (Karen Schneider)

If libraries do service these communities, what is our responsibility to inform users of the risk to their privacy and/or take proactive steps to protect their privacy. This question goes beyond, of course, statutory requirements in the United States and other countries regarding the solicitation and position of information about minors.

Granting agencies and university administrators coming to understand the importance of long-term data management and curation. The National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure will be putting out guidelines on this soon, and it will be something to watch for. (Clifford Lynch)

Network Services

This is a report of the presentations from the LITA Standards Interest Group at the ALA Annual Conference, 24-Jul-2006, in New Orleans. Pat Stevens, interim director of NISO, moderated the panel discussion.

ISSN Regina Reynolds, Library of Congress (U.S. ISSN Center)

Structure

The ISSN International Center is located in Paris. It assigns the prefixes to ISSN centers and holds a master copy of descriptive metadata — the “Key Title” plus other metadata elements in MARC format — for every assigned ISSN. It also provides documentation, a manual (about 80-100 pages in length) and support for new centers coming on board.

Activities for ISSN matters comes from a Governing board elected by the membership. The directors of ISSN centers also meeting annuallyto resolve operational issues. An “ISSN Users Group” has recently been formed as well. The ISSN standard itself is undergoing revision now.

Funding

For the U.S. this translates to about $120K/year dues to the International Centre, plus the cost of staff salaries and benefits, office space, and operational expenses. The Library of Congress pays this out of its budget.

Statistics

The U.S. assigns about 6,000 ISSNs per year, which is considered a low number because publishers should be assigning different ISSNs to different media types.

Challenges

The assignment center receives a lot of “Vanity” ISSN requests: personal newsletters, publications of only local interest (“the town gardening club”), and those seeking a “free” standard number (since there is a fee for receiving and ISBN assignment). The rules typically applied to requests for ISSNs are based on whether the serial is “in the chain of trade” — will it be cited elsewhere or included in indexing and abstracting services or in OpenURL resolvers. Recently the blogging community have been seeking ISSNs, but this has been ruled as not an appropriate use of the ISSN standard.

Future ISSN Network Directions

One question from the audience was about the possibility of running out of numbers. Almost 10,000,00 individual numbers are available for assignment, of which only about 2,000,000 have been used. The pressure of running out of numbers may cause some structural changes to be adopted. One such change that could be considered is the addition of a suffix for media type — a journal in print and the electronic manifestation of that journal would have the same ISSN (which is different than the standard practice now) and be distinguishable from a suffix added to the base ISSN.

Brian Green, International ISBN Agency

Brief History

It has universally adopted as the key identifier for books. The standard was last rewritten in 1992 and last revised in May 2005. The 13-digit ISBN comes into being on the 1st of January next year.

By definition in the standard, ISBNs are only for books. It is a “manifestation” or supply-chain identifier. Coverage includes digital monographic publications on physical carriers (CDs) or online. A separate identifier required for each electronic version separately traded. ISBNs can also be allocated to parts of books traded separately (e.g. chapters).

The migration to 13-digit ISBNs to be encompassed in the EAN-13 standard was an interesting problem. In the EAN-13 barcode system, prefixes are assigned based on country (e.g. “Germany”), not on products (e.g. “books”). So the question was how to incorporate internationally established yet product-specific ISBN into the country-specific EAN-13 system. The answer? Create a new country, “Bookland”, and give it a country prefix 978 (with 979 in reserve). GS1 (formerly EAN Int.) and ISBN now discussing the incorporation of ISBN into RFID tags as part of EPC (Electronic Product Code) standard.

Management and Governance

In 2005, the International ISBN Agency Ltd was created, and it will take over management and governance of ISBN in 2006. The International ISBN Agency is a not-for-profit, limited by guarantee organization with the guarantors/members are the national agency (160 in all). Each national agency has one vote in the governing body with a governing board elected by the members. ISO is keen on this change because it prefers to contract with an organization to be the maintenance agency of a standard; this is now possible.

Structure and Process

The move to 13-digit ISBN means that all 160 agencies have to understand the change and tweak their systems. (Each country has their own system and software, but standard management tools are now under development.)Most agencies have worked with libraries and the book trade in their countries to facilitate change.

Unlike the ISSN international agency, there is no central repository of metadata about assigned ISBNs. ISO 2108 states that ‘publishers “shall” supply local agency or its nominee with basic information about the publication to which ISBN is assigned’ but in reality this is unenforcable once the prefix has been given to the publisher. Publishers, of course, want their items to be bought, so they generally will participate in a local books-in-print effort. The International ISBN Agency publishes a list of identifier prefixes assigned to national agencies (the Publishers International ISBN Directory or PIID). National agencies compile or collaborate in producing a local books in print (for instance, Bowker in the US, Nielsen BookData in UK). In many cases, the compilation is aligned with a national bibliography effort.

Funding

Chuck Koscher, Technology Director, CrossRef

Service Infrastructure provided by CrossRef and DOI

• Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI): Develops and maintains the Handle system. It is a technology partner to the International DOI Foundation (IDF) and an advocate for broad technical solutions.
• International DOI Foundation’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI): Develops and maintains the DOI standard and is an advocate for DOI-related technology.
• CrossRef: Operates a metadata look-up service for the registration of metadata about a DOI identifier, servicing queries to discover the appropriate DOI identifier, and redirection of resolver requests to provide a stable space for these persistent identifiers as the underlying objects move around. CrossRef also sustains a community of users (publishers, libraries, aggregators, secondaries) making use of DOIs as well as monitoring and maintaining the integrity of the resolver service (quality of metadata and links to objects).

Structure and Process

• A resolver address (http: //dx.doi.org/) which itself is not a formal part of the DOI.
• The DOI Prefix (10.1016) assigned to publishers by the DOI maintenance organization.
• The DOI Suffix (S0040-4039(01)80789-9) created by publishers.

DOIs are a special subset of the CNRI Handles; any CNRI Handle that beings with “10.” is a DOI prefix. A DOI and a CNRI Handle are technically the same thing sharing the same resolving infrastructure. One can resolve a CNRI handle against a DOI resolver (for now, may be blocked in the future) and one can resolve a DOI against a CNRI handle resolver.

To assign a DOI, a publisher sends the article metadata to CrossRef with the assigned DOI prefix and publisher-defined suffix. Systems can query the CrossRef database using citation metadata to determine if a DOI exists for that citation. If so, a user interface can present the referring article as an active link to a DOI resolver. When the user selects the link, the browser contacts a DOI resolver and receives in return a URL to the reference document.

Finances

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.ala.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/igstandards/standards.htm on June 9th, 2011.