ONIX-PL Encoding Project

In 2013, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the National Information Standards Organization a grant to support the encoding of a collection of template licenses for e-resources into the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format for deposit into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing, and library systems community. The deposited encodings—made available under a Creative Commons Public Domain (CC-0) license—will allow libraries that license electronic content to import the template licenses into their own electronic resource management systems for further local customization and implementation. The project will also fund some publicly available training resources that will inform community members on how to use those encodings for their own purposes.

JISC Collections, a division of the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) that manages electronic content acquisitions for member institutions of higher learning in the UK, has already encoded all of the licenses for JISC Collections-subscribed content and deposited them in their KnowledgeBase Plus (KB+) database. While KB+ has proven a useful tool for institutions in the UK, it has not moved beyond this venue because the encodings produced by the JISC Collections are restricted to JISC members’ usage. To encourage ONIX-PL adoption, JISC Collections is providing $10,000 in funding support for the project to provide training in the encoding format and the ONIX-PL Editing software.

NISO contracted with Selden Lamoureux to obtain the template licenses, encode them in ONIX-PL format, and deposit the files in the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebases. The Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) is an element of the larger Kuali OLE initiative to provide open source management systems to the library and academic communities. Much like the success that the KB+ project has had in the UK, the GOKb project has the potential to advance the state of library encodings in the broader library community, once this project’s encodings have been deposited.

To ensure the use of these encodings and ongoing sustainability of the project, NISO will be producing at least four recorded 60-to-90-minute video training sessions. The training will show librarians how to export a template license from GOKb+, import it into an ERM system, and customize the template match an organization’s specific license terms. Some training will be directed towards publishers, explaining how to encode using ONIX-PL and deposit those encodings into GOKb and KB+. The training materials will be available from the NISO website under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY).

ONIX-PL Encoding Project - Training Sessions

Access to the 60-minute training webinar is available: ONIX-PL Encoding Project Archive Access

Agenda

Todd Carpenter - Executive Director, NISO
A brief history and introductory overview of ONIX-PL

Selden Lamoureux - Consultant, SDLInforms; former Electronic Resources Librarian
A status report on the project to date, and a brief description of future training sessions

ONIX-PL Encoding Project - Training Session, Part 1
Click here to access the full recording of the training session.