Footnotes

1. “In addition to the continuous maintenance of the standard described above, a comprehensive review of a database standard at regular intervals may be necessary which is organized in accordance with the rules in the ISO/IEC Directives and the ISO Supplement for the systematic review process.” Procedure for the development and maintenance of standards in database format. Annex ST of the ISO supplement to the ISO/IEC Directives.

I’m pleased to announce that the Fall 2010 issue of NISO‘s International Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is done and available online to NISO members and ISQ subscribers. Print copies are scheduled to be mailed on December 28th. The individual issue is available for purchase (see the form link to on the issue homepage), and some of the articles are freely available on the NISO website. The theme for the issue is resource sharing, and I was privileged to be the guest editor for the issue. Included below is my introduction letter to whet your appetite for the full issue.

Issue Introduction: “Do More … With Someone Else”

This issue contains articles that illustrate new approaches and improvements to resource sharing. One feature article is an exploration by Kyle Banerjee and Anya Arnold of the standards and protocols used by the Orbis Cascade Alliance Consortial Borrowing System. The first consortium to use the WorldCat Navigator software, the Alliance is at the forefront of pushing interoperability between various systems. Their experience points to practical issues when standards such as Z39.50 and NCIP are used to connect multi-party, multi-system environments. A second feature contains a compilation of some of the new tools, systems, and standards that are available for resource sharing. One or more might be right for you.

As important as standards are in making the data bits flow smoothly from place-to-place, the ways in which projects are financed and sustained are key to enabling those bits to keep flowing. In the opinion section of this issue are two articles that address funding models for cooperative information resources and repositories. First, Edward Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Principal Editor and Senior Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), review the successes and the challenges of their effort to endow a fund for the maintenance and expansion of an open access encyclopedia. SEP started by soliciting commitments first from libraries and private donors, then from individuals. Now they are striving to find new “carrots” for contributors to make up the difference in the hopes of avoiding “sticks” that may result in closed access. In the second article, Oya Rieger and Simeon Warner discuss the early stages of finding a sustainable business model for the arXiv service. Up to this point it has been supported by the generosity of the host institution. Twenty years after it was founded and ten years after it moved from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Cornell University, an international advisory group is now working on a business plan for the long-term sustainability of arXiv.

The member spotlight is an interview with Susan Campbell of the College Center for Library Automation (CCLA) in Florida. CCLA is making use of standards such as COUNTER/SUSHI, NCIP, and Open URL to support their consortium members.

Much of the focus today seems to be on electronic resources, but a substantial volume of physical materials are still being shared and finding cost-effective ways of doing this are more important than ever. In the NISO Reports section Valerie Horton and Diana Sachs-Silveira, co-chairs of the Physical Delivery of Library Resources working group, provide an update on their work to create a recommended practice for optimizing the sharing of items between libraries.

In times of “do more with less” perhaps the phrase we should take to heart is “do more with someone else.” By combining efforts we can be greater than the sum of our parts. We need to stretch, enhance, and redefine the standards and processes used today to meet this new, critical mission. I hope this issue of ISQ helps you find ways to do just that.

NISO voting members are currently considering two new work items: a statement of best practices for the physical delivery of library resources and formalizing the NLM journal article DTD de facto standards. The Physical Delivery and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles proposal documents are openly available for download.

The first is a proposal submitted by Valerie Horton, Executive Director, Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC), on the Physical Delivery of Library Resources — and subsequently approved by NISO’s Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee —that aims to develop a statement of best practices. This proposed project would build on the efforts of three recent projects: Moving Mountains, Rethinking Resource Sharing’s Physical Delivery Committee, and the American Library Association’s ASCLA ICAN’s Physical Delivery Discussion Group. The document is proposed to include recommendations for: packaging, shipping codes, labeling, acceptable turn-around time, lost or damaged materials handling, package tracking, ergonomic considerations, statistics, sorting, a set of elements to be used for comparison purposes to determine costs, linking of regional and local library carriers, and international delivery.

The second proposal on Standardized Markup for Journal Articles was submitted by Jeff Beck, Technical Information Specialist, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) — and subsequently approved by NISO’s Content & Collection Management Topic Committee — and is based on the National Library of Medicine’s journal archiving and interchange tag suite. Three schemas for journal articles are include in the Suite and are maintained by NLM: NLM Archiving and Interchange Tag Set, NLM Journal Publishing Tag Set, and the NLM Article Authoring Tag Set. The goal of this work item is to take the currently existing Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite version 3.0, the three journal article schemas, and the documentation and shepherd them through the NISO process to become an ANSI/NISO consensus standard.

For a proposed working group to get started, at least 10% of NISO’s Voting Members must express an interest in the work item. The Physical Delivery ballot ends on September 1 and Journal Article Markup ends on September 2. Should the work items be approved, you can express interest in joining the working groups by using the NISO Contact Form, even if you aren’t affiliated with a NISO Voting Member organization.

In March, I gave a presentation at the NISO forum on Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards. For those that were there, you may remember the bulk of the presentation was in the screencast tours of the functionality of 10 OPAC enhancement tools. Topping out at over 750MB, the presentation file was too big to share, but I promised to put together a combination of the presentation audio and the screencast videos in a much more manageable size. That video, along with a cleaned up version of the audio, is posted below.

For more information about the presentation, including links to the 10 tools that were demonstrated, see the previous DLTJ post on the topic. Lastly, here are some links to the downloadable form of the presentations:

• Presentation video (same as above, in Flash format, 90MB)
• Presentation audio (MP3 format, 49MB)

Thank you to the NISO staff for making the audio available.

Update

Below are the supplemental links for the presentation at the NISO workshop on discovery layers in Chapel Hill, NC, on March 28, 2008.

Update 20080404T1124 : Carolyn McCallum at Wake Forest University posted a great summary of day two of the NISO discovery layer forum, including an overview of my talk. Thanks, Carolyn!

Foundational Pieces

Tour of Systems

Web OPAC Enhancements

Library Thing for Libraries

Homepage

http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/

Demo site

http://blais.claremont.edu/

Web OPAC Wrappers

SOPAC

Homepage

http://www.blyberg.net/2007/01/21/aadlorg-goes-social/

Demo site

http://www.aadl.org/catalog/

Web OPAC Replacements

AquaBrowser

Homepage

http://www.medialab.nl/

Demo site

http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/

Encore

Homepage

http://www.iii.com/encore/main_index2.html

Demo site

http://ukty-mt.iii.com/iii/encore/app

Primo

Homepage

http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/PrimoOverview

Demo site

http://prime2.oit.umn.edu:1701/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=TWINCITIES&reset_config=true

WorldCat Local

Homepage

http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/

Demo site

http://osu.worldcat.org/

Blacklight

Homepage

http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/

Demo site

http://blacklight.betech.virginia.edu/

fac-back-opac

Homepage

http://code.google.com/p/fac-back-opac/

Demo site

http://library.paulsmiths.edu/catalog

Scriblio

Homepage

http://about.scriblio.net/

Demo site

http://library.plymouth.edu/

SOPAC2

Homepage

http://www.blyberg.net/2008/08/16/sopac-20-what-to-expect/

Demo site

http://www.darienlibrary.org/

VuFind

Homepage

http://vufind.org/

Demo site

http://vufind.org/demo/

On the Horizon…

BiblioCommons

Homepage

http://bibliocommons.com/

Demo site

http://www.opl.on.ca/

Extensible Catalog (XC)

Homepage

http://extensiblecatalog.info

Presentation Mechanics

[Updated 20080329T1925 : Added links.]

[Updated 20080424T1151 : Updated link to the NISO page for the event. Thanks Jodi!]

[Update 20080911T1143 : Added SOPAC2 and Bibliocommons (thanks Josh!) plus XC as well as a link to the screencast/audio mashup of the session.]

[Updated 20090526T1603 : Added link to Oakville Public Library as an example of Bibliocommons. Thanks, Chris!]

The text was modified to update a link from dltj.org/article/web-opac-schemes/ to http:///dltj.org/article/web-opac-schemes/ on December 30th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/next-generation-library-catalogs.html to http://www.alatechsource.org/ltr/next-generation-library-catalogs on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to https://publications.techsource.ala.org/bookstore/displayItem.pl?itemID=2604 on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://ukty-mt.iii.com/iii/encore/app on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.iii.com/encore/main_index2.html to http://web.archive.org/web/20080328163000/http://www.iii.com/encore/main_index2.html on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://blacklight.betech.virginia.edu/ to http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/blacklight.html on January 28th, 2011.

NISO is conducting a workshop later this month called Next Generation Discovery: New Tools, Aging Standards. The workshop is described this way: “Discovering scholarly information and data is essential for research and use of the content that the information community is producing and making available. The development of knowledge bases, web systems, repositories, and other sources for this information brings the need for effective discovery — search-driven discovery and network (or browse) driven discovery — tools to the forefront. With new tools and systems emerging, however, are standards keeping pace with the next generation of tools? What’s coming up and where might standards fit to assist in this arena? The forum will include both a look at the current state of discovery tools and at new visions of what these tools might look like in the next several years.”

I am privileged to be on the agenda for a session on the second day called “Discovery Tools and the OPAC.” A foundational element of the talk is an earlier DLTJ post that categorized ways OPACs can be enhanced. The full abstract is:

The workshop starts with a keynote by Richard Ackerman plus presentations by Eric Schnell and Dave Munger, and Dinah Sanders from Innovative Interfaces. Early-bird registration for the workshop ends a week from today.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/ to http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/ on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/agenda.html to http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/agenda/ on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://brewing.iii.com/2008/03/05/taking-my-show-and-crutches-on-the-road/ on January 20th, 2011.

What’s the deal with NCIP? For those that don’t know, NCIP is the NISO protocol that attempts to “define the various transactions needed to support circulation activities among independent library systems.” For example, “patron and item inquiry and update transactions, such as hold or reserve, check-out, renew, and check-in.”

I came away from a meeting yesterday at the State Library of Ohio on plans to investigate a new statewide resource sharing system somewhat confused about the state of this standard. Those in the meeting were pessimistic, based apparently on experience with prior products that claimed to be “NCIP compliant,” about the standard’s ability to truly “support circulation activities among independent library systems.” From what I could gather, even with the approved standard and implementations that can claim compliance with the standard, there is enough variability in interpretation that bilateral testing and agreement on meanings of messages was still required to make it work. And that so much flexibility was possible that such bilateral testing and agreement is a very time consuming process.

A little searching turned up the NCIP Implementation Group website hosted and maintained by EnvisionWare, Inc. It seems somewhat stagnant, though (the link to the discussion mailing list leads to a 404-not-found error page). I stopped following NCIP a number of years ago, but I thought I understood the basic concepts and remember thinking that what was going on was a good thing. In fact, I assumed, based on what remember from those several years ago, that the issue of inter-ILS circulation communication was a solved problem. Fast forwarding to now, is the world of inter-ILS communication really this bad? Is anything being done to solve it? Does “NCIP Compliant” actually mean anything?

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=728 to http://www.niso.org/workrooms/ncip on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.winslo.state.oh.us/ to http://www.library.ohio.gov/ on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://ohiolibrarycollaboration.blogspot.com/ on January 20th, 2011.

On Monday, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the NISO workshop “Getting the Most Out of Your Institutional Repository” on the topic of The Third Wave of Library Information Stewardship. The presentation abstract was:

[Academic] Libraries are gearing up for the third wave of information under our stewardship. In the first wave, libraries purchased, made discoverable, and managed information from commercial sources in physical forms (e.g., paper-bound monographs, traditional serials, and microform archives). In the second wave, libraries licensed, made discoverable, and supported information from commercial sources in digital form (e.g., electronic journals, index/abstract databases, and image collections).

Libraries are now entering the third wave: selecting, publishing, and curating locally-produced digital content (institutional repositories, pre-print archives, and other locally unique collections). In this third wave, we need the skills and techniques of all of the previous stages, plus a need to learn a few new tricks. This presentation offers an overview of the selection, publication, and curation of locally-produced digital content. The speaker will also end with a glimpse of the fourth wave.

This DLTJ posting is a placeholder for a link to the anticipated recording of the presentation (I’ll update the page when the recording is available) and as a place for attendees to offer comments on the talk. I’ll create a separate posting for my impressions of the meeting and what I learned from the other presenters.

One correction I must make: I gave the conference organizers an older version of my biographical statement. It said that I was heading a project called the Digital Resource Commons that is bringing hosted repositories to OhioLINK members. That (insert one or more of of: mission, honor, duty, challenge, responsibility, dream, nightmare…) is now in the extraordinarily capable hands of John Davison on the OhioLINK staff. Content repositories at institutions (which, as I said in my talk, shouldn’t necessarily be equated to “institutional repositories” as we know them now) remains a key professional interest and activity, just not with the awesome (insert another word from the list above) of running the project. ¹

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/ir07/agenda.html to http://www.niso.org/news/events/niso/past/ir07/agenda.html on January 19th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. See the “New Title, New Challenges” posting from earlier this year for more background on the job change.

[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.

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.