Vocabulary Management

About the work

As interest in the new environment for sharing bibliographic information grows, questions
about appropriate policies and the supporting infrastructure come increasingly into focus.
NISO began exploring these questions in 2013 as part of its NISO Bibliographic Roadmap
Development Project, which examined requirements for usability and adoption of advanced
bibliographic exchange in a global networked environment. As one of the outcomes from
this initiative, late in 2014 NISO’s voting members approved a project to address issues
described in the work item Development of Standards to Support Bibliographic Data
Exchange.

As described in the work item, three working groups were established as well as a steering
committee, consisting of the working group co-chairs and a liaison to the NISO Content and
Collections Management Topic Committee, to coordinate and oversee the groups' work. The
Use/Reuse working group looked at policy and social considerations, including appropriate
licenses and permissions, maintenance expectations, and versioning. The Documentation
working group examined standards for documentation of vocabulary properties, particularly
as they relate to discovery and usage, as well as governance and sustainability issues. The
Preservation working group examined the landscape issue of "orphan vocabularies," where
organizations abandon vocabularies for lack of funding or when the vocabularies cannot
make the transition between print and digital.