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"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."
- Saint Augustine of Hippo

Later this month, a few of the NISO staff will participate in the annual plenary meeting of the ISO Technical Committee on Information & Documentation (TC46) and its five subcommittees. It is always a busy week, drawing together some 150 experts from around the world to discuss progress toward a variety of standards on everything from country codes to transliteration standards, physical item maintenance, records management issues, and identifiers. The United States is an active participant in many of these efforts, which include NISO's role as secretariat of the subcommittee on Identification and Description (TC 46/SC 9), the manager of standards such as ISBN, ISSN, ISRC, DOI and several vocabulary standards.

This year, the plenary meeting will be held in Pretoria, South Africa, at the kind invitation of national standards body the South African Bureau of Standards. The fact that this year we are hosted in Africa is an important reminder of the worldwide nature of the efforts we are engaged in. More importantly, however, it reminds us of the value of our work in supporting dissemination of content to communities that can benefit the most from improved education, improved health outcomes from research, efficient and accessible content dissemination, content discovery, and preservation. For all that first-world people often complain about, there are places where significant structural problems impact a majority of the population. Yet work in those countries continues despite fewer resources, more limited tools, and reduced connectivity.

While we in the United States, Western Europe, and other "developed countries" have plenty that we can share, there is much for us to learn from engaging with developing nations in Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Creativity in solving problems is often a result of resource constraints. Seeing how others approach a problem and deal with the limited resources at their disposal can lead one to consider ways to better utilize the resources that we do have. There is so much learning we can all benefit from.

Each year I look forward to seeing our international standards development colleagues and this year is no different in that respect. However, this year adds the opportunity to learn from colleagues who operate in an environment different from ours. I am looking forward to the opportunity to meet, learn from, and share with colleagues with whom we don't regularly engage. Distance need not be the barrier it once was, but we still need an impetus to encourage connection. We all can do more to bring under-represented groups into our efforts, whether those groups are from our neighboring communities, other organizations, or half a world away. I hope that we will be able to extend our impact, but also that we will bring some of the learning and improved relationships back with us after our trip, and use them to expand the perspectives that make our standards better.

We will report on the outcomes of the plenary meeting during the NISO Open Teleconference on June 12 at 3:00pm Eastern time. In addition to our regular update of ISO activities, I hope to also report on some of the things I've learned during our visit to South Africa.

Sincerely,

Todd Carpenter

Executive Director

NISO Reports

Media Stories

What Constitutes Peer Review of Data? A Survey of Peer Review Guidelines

The Scholarly Kitchen, April 11, 2017; by Todd Carpenter

At the turn of the decade, a movement began to advance publication of research data sets as first class research objects. This has led to a variety of successful initiatives that aim to increase awareness and improve practice regarding the publication of datasets. Part of the data publication process is the peer review of those research data sets, a process examined in this paper by NISO Executive Director, Todd Carpenter.

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Indoor GPS Apps Closer to Reality With New NIST Challenge

NIST News, April 7, 2017

GPS would be very helpful in large, unfamiliar buildings such as museums and shopping malls, but it doesn't currently work well indoors. NIST has launched a competition to change that, and aims to have the resulting app help not only regular consumers but also first responders who are trying find victims or each other.

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Open Data Projects Win Wellcome Trust, NIH and HHMI Open Science Prize

PLOS Blog, April 18, 2017; by Sheryl P. Denker

In this interview, computational biologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, discusses "open data, attribution, licensing and his experience in using preprints to support a publication strategy that releases data quickly while providing peer-reviewed citations for himself, his international collaborators and his postdocs and students."

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Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

The Atlantic, April 20, 2017; by James Somers

What happened to Google's plan to digitize every book and create a library of all human knowledge?

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The Canadian Linked Data Summit: Developing Canada's Linked Data Future through Cooperative Alliances

Collaborative Librarianship Vol. 9 (2017), Issue 1; by Jennifer J. Browning, Robin Elizabeth Desmeules, Sharon Farnel, and Andrew Senior

"Motivated by the realization that Canada may be behind the curve in linked data development, the Canadian Linked Data Initiative (CLDI) was collectively constituted by its members with the aim to develop a communal approach for linked data development in Canada. By joining together individual library departments and cultural institutions across Canada, CLDI seeks to nurture and sustain a culture of open metadata creation and the application of machine-linkable technologies through collaboration."

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W3C Publishes XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 3.0 Proposed Recommendation

"The XSLT Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 3.0. This specification defines the syntax and semantics of XSLT 3.0, a language designed primarily for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. XSLT 3.0 is a revised version of the XSLT 2.0 Recommendation published on 23 January 2007."

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Current ISO Ballots

NISO Voting Members participate in the development, revision, and evaluation of standards. Voting Members are able to influence the standards process and mold the future of the industry. The following ballots are open and will close before the next newsletter is distributed. If you are a NISO Voting Member, log into your NISO page and you'll see the ballots linked there.

  • Systematic Review of ISO TC46 SC9 ISO 832 Second Edition, Information and documentation - Bibliographic description and references - Rules for the abbreviation of bibliographic terms

    This International Standard specifies rules for the abbreviation of words and word combinations that commonly appear in bibliographic descriptions and references in languages using the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets.

    Abbreviations of titles and title words are excluded from the scope of this International Standard and are covered by the provisions of ISO 4.

    This ballot closes on May 29, 2017.

  • Systematic Review of ISO 27729:2012, Information and Documentation - International standard name identifier (ISNI)

    This International Standard specifies the International Standard name identifier (ISNI) for the identification of public identities of parties, i.e. the identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management and content distribution chains.

    The ISNI system uniquely identifies public identities across multiple fields of creative activity and provides a tool for disambiguating public identities that might otherwise be confused.

    This ballot closes on May 29, 2017.

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