Proposals for NISO Work Items: Physical Delivery Best Practices and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles

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.