NISO has been the U.S. liaison group for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 46 (TC 46) on Information and Documentation for decades. Officially designated by ANSI as the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for TC46, NISO submits the U.S. votes and comments on all TC46 standards, based on the ballot results from the U.S. TC46 TAG members. (NISO voting members that are incorporated (or otherwise legally registered) in the U.S. are members of the TAG.)
In 2013, NISO submitted U.S. votes and comments on 14 draft standards, 3 systematic reviews, and 3 new work items. Additionally, comments were provided on 5 standards from other ISO committees that are in a liaison relationship with TC46 and NISO responded to 5 calls for participation that were issued separately from ballots.
This article summarizes the work of TC46 and its five subcommittees during 2013.
TC46
Secretariat: Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR)
Secretary: Sabine Donnard Cusse
Chairperson: Françoise Pellé (ISSN International Centre)
The TC46 plenary meeting was held on June 3 (opening) and June 7 (closing), 2013 in Paris, France.
Standard revisions published:
- ISO3166-1:2013, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes (3rd edition)
- ISO3166-2:2013, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 2: Country subdivision code (3rdedition)
- ISO3166-3:2013,Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries (2nd edition)
Standards confirmed:
- ISO3602:1989, Documentation – Romanization of Japanese (kana script)
Systematic reviews underway at the end of 2013:
- ISO11940:1998, Information and documentation – Transliteration of Thai
Projects underway:
- Revision of ISO 5127, Information and documentation – Foundation and Vocabulary [renamed from Vocabulary]
- Revision of ISO 7098:1991, Information and documentation – Romanization of Chinese
Projects on hold:
- Revision of ISO8:1977, Documentation – Presentation of periodicals [pending nomination of additional publisher experts for the working group]
New liaisons:
- International ISBN Agency, Category A (The ISBN IA was already a liaison with SC9.)
Miscellaneous:
- SAC (China) was appointed as Secretariat of WG4, Terminology of information and documentation. Liu Chunyan was appointed as the Convenor.
SC4: Technical Interoperability
Secretariat: Finnish Standards Association (SFS)
Secretary: Kati Heiskanen
Chairperson: Juha Hakala (The National Library of Finland)
The SC4 plenary meeting was held on June 6, 2013 in Paris, France.
Standard revisions published:
- ISO 25577:2013, Information and documentation – MarcXchange (2nd edition)
Systematic reviews underway at the end of 2013:
- ISO 6630:1986, Documentation – Bibliographic control characters
- ISO 23950:1998, Information and documentation – Information retrieval (Z39.50) – Application service definition and protocol specification
- ISO 20775:2009, Information and documentation – Schema for holdings information
- ISO 15836:2009, Information and documentation – The Dublin Core metadata element set
Projects underway:
- Minor revisions of the ILL series of standards:
ISO 10160, Information and documentation – Open Systems Interconnection – Interlibrary Loan Application Service Definition
ISO 10161-1, Information and documentation – Open Systems Interconnection – Interlibrary Loan Application Protocol Specification – Part 1: Protocol specification;
ISO 10161-2, Information and documentation – Open Systems Interconnection – Interlibrary Loan Application Protocol Specification – Part 2: Protocol implementation conformance statement (PICS) proforma.
Standards will be kept in place while still in use and pending the expected adoption of the forthcoming new ILL Transactions standard (ISO 18626).
- New standard in development: ISO 18626, Information and documentation – Interlibrary Loan Transactions
- Revision of ISO 21127, Information and documentation – A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information
- Revision of ISO 28560-1:2011, Information and documentation – RFID in libraries – Part 1: Data elements and general guidelines for implementation
- Revision of ISO 28560-2:2011, Information and documentation – RFID in libraries – Part 2: Encoding of RFID data elements based on rules from ISO/IEC 15962
- Revision of ISO 28560-3:2011, Information and documentation – RFID in libraries – Part 3: Fixed length encoding
- New technical specification in development: ISO/TS28560-4, Information and documentation – RFID in libraries – Part 4: Encoding of data elements based on rules from ISO/IEC 15962 in an RFID tag with partitioned memory
Projects canceled:
- The proposal for a Part 5 on unique item identifier (UII) for the RFID in Libraries standard (ISO 28560) was cancelled as an SC4 project and the proposer was directed to re-submit the proposal to SC9 for consideration.
New liaisons:
- International ISBN Agency, Category A (The ISBN IA was already a liaison with SC9.)
Maintenance agency updates:
- ISIL – There are now 27 National ISIL Allocation Agencies and 2 non-national ISIL agencies.
- ILL – The maintenance agency (MA) for the ISO 10160 and 10161 series of ILL standards was disbanded. With the closing of the Library and Archives Canada’s interlibrary loan services department, they could no longer serve as the MA. With the stable status of this standard and the expectation of a new ILL transaction standard (ISO 18626), the committee decided this maintenance agency was no longer needed.
Miscellaneous:
- A new joint working group (JWG) between TC46/SC4 and two other committees—ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 (Document description and processing languages) and IEC/TC 100/TA 10 (Multimedia e-publishing and e-book technologies)—was approved to investigate the means for improving the archivability of EPUB 3 through the creation of a METS profile.
SC8: Quality – Statistics and Performance Evaluation
Secretariat: Deutsches Institute für Normung (DIN)
Secretary: Hans-Jörg Wiesner
Chairperson: Dr Roswitha Poll through 2013; beginning 2014 Steve Hiller (University of Washington) SC8 held three plenary meetings in 2013: on January 18 in Berlin, Germany; June 6 in Paris, France; and October 18 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
New standards published:
- ISO/TR 14873:2013, Information and documentation – Statistics and quality issues for web archiving
Standard revisions published:
- ISO 2789:2013, Information and documentation – International library statistics (5th edition)
Projects underway:
- Revision of ISO11620, Information and documentation – Library performance indicators
- New standard in development: ISO16439, Information and documentation – Methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries
- New standard in development: ISO18461, International museum statistics
New work item pending:
- Proposed new standard: Information and documentation – International archives statistics
Miscellaneous:
- Claire Creaser was appointed as convener of WG2, International library statistics, and WG 4, Performance indicators for libraries, effective January 2014.
- Steve Hiller was appointed as the convener of WG10, Methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries, effective January 2014.
- Two working groups were disbanded: WG5, Price indexes, and WG 6, Statistics on production of books, etc.
SC9: Identification and Description
Secretariat: American National Standards Institute
Secretary: Todd Carpenter (NISO)
Chairperson: Sam Gyun Oh (Sungkyunkwan University, Korea)
The SC9 plenary meeting was held on June 5, 2013 in Paris, France.
New standards published:
- ISO 25964-2:2013, Information and documentation – Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies – Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies
- ISO 27729:2013/Cor.1:2013, Technical Corrigendum 1 to ISO 27729, Information and documentation – International Standard Name Identifier, to correct an error in Annex A, Table A1 regarding the method for calculating the check character
Standards confirmed:
- ISO 7220:1996, Information and documentation – Presentation of catalogues of standards
Systematic reviews underway at the end of 2013:
- ISO 21047:2009, Information and documentation – International Standard Text Code (ISTC)
- ISO 5963:1985, Documentation – Methods for examining documents, determining their subjects, and selecting indexing terms
- ISO 999:1996, Information and documentation – Guidelines for the content, organization and presentation of indexes
- ISO 15706-1:2002, Information and documentation – International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN) – Part 1: Audiovisual work identifier
Projects underway:
- Revision of ISO 2108:2005, Information and documentation – International standard book number (ISBN)
- Revision of ISO 3901:2001, Information and documentation– International Standard Recording Code (ISRC)
- New standard in development: ISO 17316, Information and documentation – International standard link identifier (ISLI) [The title of this standard was changed from International Standard Document Link.]
Projects on hold:
-
Revision of ISO 15707, Information and documentation– International Standard Musical Work Code (ISWC) – pending appointment of a new convenor
Withdrawn:
- ISO TR 21449, Content Delivery and Rights Management: Functional requirements for identifiers and descriptors for use in the music, film, video, sound recording and publishing industries
Maintenance agency updates:
- DOI–DOI resolutions have grown to a rate of close to 1.5 billion DOI resolutions per year, with over 91 million registered DOIs by the end of 2013. China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) was appointed as a second Registration Agency in China. RR Bowker has withdrawn as a DOI Registration Agency.
- ISAN–ISAN Portugal was appointed as a new ISAN Registration Agency. The International Standard Audiovisual Number International Agency (ISAN-IA) and the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) have embarked on efforts to support seamless registration of content IDs in either system to enable content producers and distributors to take full advantage of the capabilities of both systems. The ISAN-IA was one of the 14 signatories to the Declaration on Audiovisual Work Identifiers at the Licences for Europe meeting on November 13, 2013, which included a recommendation for the full implementation of the interoperability between ISAN and EIDR.
- ISBN–The sixth edition of the ISBN Users’ Manual is now available in Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish, as well as English. The 40th edition of the Publishers’ International ISBN Directory, which lists the ISBN prefixes and their associated publishers and addresses, was published in December 2013.
- ISMN–Iceland became the 57th country to join the ISMN system.
- ISNI–The number of assigned ISNIs reached over 7 million by the end of 2013 with ~425,000 assigned to institutions. The National Library of Finland and the National Library of New Zealand became members of the ISNI-International Agency (ISNI-IA). ISNI and ORCID issued a joint statement on interoperation.
- ISSN–61,696 new ISSN records were entered into the register in 2013.
- ISRC–Following the exhaustion of ISRCs with the “GB” code in the United Kingdom, ISRCs began to be assigned using the “UK” code. A similar issue is expected with the French “FR” codes, thus a new code of “FX” was designated, expected to begin use in 2014. Appointment of new national registration agencies has been suspended pending the revision of the standard.
- ISTC–RR Bowker in the US and Thorpe-Bowker in Australia both withdrew as ISTC Registration Agencies.
SC10: Requirements for Document Storage and Conditions for Preservation
Secretariat: Deutsches Institute für Normung (DIN) Secretary: Hans-Jörg Wiesner
Chairperson: Dr. Sebastian Barteleit (Bundesarchives [Federal Archives], Germany)
The TC46 members voted in 2013 to reactivate SC10, previously called Keeping of Documents but renamed to Requirements for document storage and conditions for preservation. The scope was defined as: Standardization of requirements for storage and use of documents in libraries, archives and documentation centres, as well as practices related to maintenance and improvement of the conditions of preservation. Excluded from the scope are standardization activities for: photography and other media within the scope of TC46 and micrographics and optical memories within the scope of TC171.
Seven published standards and one project underway, previously managed by the parent committee, were moved to the responsibility of the new subcommittee. Four working groups were established to address: deacidification of paper, document storage requirements, permanence of writing, printing and copying media on paper documents, and binding materials and binding practices.
SC11: Archives and Records Management
Secretariat: Standards Australia Secretary: Agnes Simai
Chairperson: David Moldrich (Arrow Energy)
The SC11 plenary meeting was held on June 3 (opening) and June 6 (closing), 2013 in Paris, France.
Systematic reviews underway at the end of 2013:
- ISO 23081-2:2009, Information and documentation – Managing metadata for records – Part 2: Conceptual and implementation issues
Projects underway:
- Revision of ISO 15489-1, Information and documentation – Records management – Part 1: General
- Revision of ISO TR15489-2, Information and documentation – Records management – Part 2: Guidelines
The SC’s first plenary meeting since its reactivation was scheduled for January 2014 in Berlin, Germany.
Systematic reviews underway at the end of 2013:
- ISO11800:1998, Information and documentation – Requirements for binding materials and methods used in the manufacture of books
- ISO 14416:2003, Information and documentation – Requirements for binding of books, periodicals, serials and other paper documents for archive and library use – Methods and materials
Projects underway:
- Revision of ISO 11799:2003, Information and documentation – Document storage requirements for archive and library materials
- New technical specification in development: ISO TS 18344, Recommendation on methods of validating the success of deacidification processes for printed and handwritten documents
New liaisons:
- ISO/TC42,Photography
- ISO/TC6/SC2,Test methods and quality specifications for paper and board
- New standard in development: ISO 30302, Information and documentation – Management systems for records – Guidelines for implementation
- New technical report in development: ISO/TR 18128, Information and documentation – Risk assessment for records processes and systems
New work item pending:
- Preliminary new standard proposal: How to express records management principles, models and requirements for Enterprise Architects
Projects cancelled:
- ISO/DTR 18800, Information and documentation– Implementation guidelines for disposition of records
CYNTHIA HODGSON (chodgson@niso.org) is an independent information consultant and writer/editor. She is the Managing Editor of Information Standards Quarterly and a technical editor/consultant for NISO. She also coordinates NISO’s international standardization documentation and ballots.