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Getting ideas adopted and implemented often entails the right mix of ideas, timing, resources, and willing participants. Over the past month, I've been on the road a lot at various industry meetings. They ranged from the STM Association meeting of publishers, to the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI), which both aimed to drive advances in open communications; and from Force 11's meeting of scholars and academics seeking to advance novel forms of scholarship and communications to the Fiesole retreat focused primarily on libraries and slightly more traditional issues with e-books (if one can call e-book issues traditional). In its own way, each group was interested in addressing its own community challenges and issues.

While these recent discussions differed in focus, there was overlap from meeting to meeting and I spotted many familiar faces on my travels, with each community challenged to identify the core problem and potential solutions. The themes at these meetings were so broad that I couldn't possibly cover the breadth of the discussions, nor even the highlights in which I participated, in all of Newsline, but a common theme was a sense of urgency.

The librarians and publishers at Fiesole were working to support changing models surrounding the traditional monograph, while the researchers and scholarly communications specialists at both Force11 and OSI focused on expanding new and open forms of scholarly communications. Meanwhile, the publishers present were keen on supporting these advances in scholarly communications while simultaneously focused on issues of piracy and control. While arguments can be made about which activities should be priorities and which will have the greatest impact on scholarly communications, each of these goals, and the many others discussed, requires focused attention and support from various players in the community.

No one group can drive any of the innovative ideas or solutions I heard talked about. The publishing community, which saw the need for improved access control and identity management, will need the cooperation of libraries and institutional IT staff to bring its vision to reality. Librarians focused on transforming the monograph will need the skills of publishers in content selection, formatting, and distribution to adequately serve authors, as well as in addressing some of the business model challenges. Among the issues discussed during Force11, the one that caught my attention was the need for improved institutional identity management, which will require coordination among all of those in the supply chain.

Even when all of those constituencies are brought together, as they were at OSI, some of the challenges of scholarly communications extend beyond the publisher, librarian, and software-provider communities. Some of the issues deliberated require the involvement of the faculty and administrations that play such a huge part in scholarly communications but are not robustly represented at the vast majority of these meetings. Similarly, the technology vendors that increasingly play a critical role, keeping all of these communications systems operating behind the scenes, are usually absent.

Even with the right players gathered and engaged in determining the appropriate solution, they must still marshal the resources to come to agreement and maintain the initial energy through to completion and eventually adoption. When that appropriate solution is found, the ever-present challenge of inertia remains, and the new solution must be sufficiently better than existing approaches to overcome it.

NISO has several roles to play in supporting this work, even when it is work being undertaken at other organizations. First, we can tie into those other communities, using the expertise that exists within NISO's constituency to enhance initiatives. This is particularly important when the other community needs collaborators to advance its ideas. NISO can support the educational aspects of expanding awareness of the problem and of the use cases or solutions being developed. We can also provide a neutral forum and framework within which those problems can be resolved. This process will only work, however, if those in need of the solution are willing to talk to those with the resources, the talents, and the ambition to see the results brought forth and implemented.

In the past year, we have seen the positive effects of those efforts in NISO's work on patron privacy, our efforts related to discovery, and our leadership in the domain of metrics. Importantly, each is at a stage of needing support to drive adoption. There are many more areas where we can also be beneficial and supportive of some of the ideas discussed this month. You can look forward to more reports and details from those meetings and potential efforts. I'm looking forward to seeing where the results drive us.

Sincerely,

Todd Carpenter

Executive Director

NISO Reports

New and Proposed Specs and Standards

ISO Publishes ISO/TC 46/SC 11/WB 13, Information and Documentation - Records Management - Part 1: Concepts and Principles

In this interview, Cassie Findlay, Project Leader of the working group that developed ISO/TC 46/SC 11/WG 13, discusses why records management is important, the reasons for the new version of the standard, and what it aims to achieve.

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W3C Releases TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0 (IMSC1)

The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Timed Text Working Group has released a Recommendation concerning TTML, or timed-text markup language, which enables the provision of Internet TV metadata including captions and subtitles. TTML Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.0 (IMSC1) specifies a text-only and an image-only profile of TTML and enables the system to be used worldwide.

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NIST Kicks Off Effort to Defend Encrypted Data from Quantum Computer Threat

"If an exotic quantum computer is invented that could break the codes we depend on to protect confidential electronic information, what will we do to maintain our security and privacy? That's the overarching question posed by a new report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), whose cryptography specialists are beginning the long journey toward effective answers."

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DPLA Announces RightsStatements.org

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced at its recent DPLAfest the availability of a new resource for cultural heritage organizations, RightsStatements.org. The new site, created in partnership with Creative Commons, Kennisland, and "key stakeholders of the DPLA and Europeana networks," offers 11 standard rights statements to describe the copyright status of an item. The site, notes Julia Hickie of the Australian Open Access Strategy Group, offers citable URLs for inclusion in metadata records. "This is just the kind of URL," explains Hickie, "that would go in the field proposed in last year's NISO Access and License Indicators Recommended Practice."

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Media Stories

Report from the Field: NISO Conference on Library Value and Assessment

Assessment on the Ground, April 22, 2016; by Nancy B. Turner

On April 20, NISO presented a virtual conference on how to use assessment to highlight the library's value. Presenting on the day were Steven J. Bell and Nancy B. Turner, both of Temple University; Jocelyn Wilk, Columbia University; Ken Varnum, University of Michigan; Jan Fransen, University of Minnesota; Kristi Holmes, Northwestern University: Carl Grant, University of Oklahoma; Elizabeth Brown, SUNY-Binghamton' and Starr Hoffman, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In this blog post, Turner recaps the events of the day.

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Neal Wins 2017-2018 ALA Presidency

ALA News, April 29, 2016; by JoAnne Kempf

The American Library Association has announced that James G. (Jim) Neal, university librarian emeritus at Columbia University, New York, will be the association's president for the 2017-2018 term, succeeding Sari Feldman.

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EBSCO Supports New Open Source Project

American Libraries, April 22, 2016; by Marshall Breeding

A new nonprofit organization, the Open Library Foundation, has been established to oversee the development of an open-source library platform. The new product, which is expected to be released in 2018, will offer academic libraries the kind of software that meshes with their values more than do current commercially available options. As-yet-unnamed, the product will also allow institutions to separate their discovery services from their resource management. The Kuali Foundation, which was up till recently developing its own Open Library Environment (OLE), has discontinued that plan in favor of working with EBSCO on this open-source venture.

NISO Note: EBSCO Information Services is a NISO Voting Member.

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Getting Our Hands Dirty: Why Academics Should Design Metrics and Address the Lack of Transparency

The Impact Blog, April 6, 2016; by Chris Elsden, Sebastian Mellor, and Rob Comber

"Metrics in academia are often an opaque mess, filled with biases and ill-judged assumptions that are used in overly deterministic ways," say Elsden, Mellor, and Comber. Part of the London School of Economics's Accelerated Academy series, their article urges academics to be more involved in the design of metrics, and the authors discuss a related project at their institution, Newcastle University in England.

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Europe Tried to Rein in Google. It Backfired

New York Times, April 18, 2016; by Mark Scott

European citizens envisioned gaining more control of their Internet privacy when directives from the European Court gave them the "right to be forgotten." This meant that individuals could petition to have material about them made unavailable through Google searches. Two years later, though, citizens' groups are up in arms at how cases are being decided: Google itself is the adjudicator.

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President, First Lady Review Design Proposals for Presidential Library

Chicago Tribune, May 2, 2016; by Blair Kamin

On May 1, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and members of the Barack Obama Foundation attended presentations by the seven architectural firms that have created visions for the Obama Presidential Center, the Chicago building that will house the Presidential Library.

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Nothing Compares to Prince

In the Muse: Performing Arts Blog, April 27, 2016; by Pat Padua

Prince registered some 500 items for copyright, including unreleased recordings, says Padua, a digital conversion specialist at the Library of Congress's Music Division, who worked on the Library's Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Padua notes that the Library also holds movies by and books about the prolific performer, who died on April 21.

NISO Note: The Library of Congress is a NISO Voting Member.

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