Letter From the Editor
Each May, NISO staff and members of our standards community gather for a meeting of the ISO Technical Committee for Information and Documentation (ISO/TC 46) and its various subcommittees. This is the committee that creates and promotes formal international standards for the publishing and library communities, and is responsible for everything from country codes (used in Internet top level domains), transliteration standards, and content identifiers, to metadata structures, preservation of materials, and standards for archives and records management. It is a dense and significant portfolio of activities that isn’t easily or neatly summarized. As is the case with many technical standards, it’s also not a set of work that is obvious most of the time, but which underpins much of the international trade in content and information services. One could hardly imagine an international book trade without ISBNs or ISSNs for serials, library cataloging without the MARC record structure, metadata without Dublin Core elements, nor any literary translation (outside Roman-based languages) without character transliteration.
Standardization at the international level is by no means a rapid process and the challenges to consensus are often significant. The process of agreeing on standards is often difficult enough, but adding to this back-and-forth are the difficulties of translation and working across languages and cultures, not to mention the less-meaningful-but-equally-cumbersome logistics of location and time zones. However, the stakes at an ISO level are often higher and the issues considerably more strained than in other situations. What might have functioned perfectly in a particular national context might not work as well in another. However, as the world has become more interconnected and distribution of content is frequently international, this suite of standards is critically important.
Also at an international level, though not within ISO/TC 46, NISO is now engaged in work on document processing languages, through a Joint Technical Committee (JTC 1/SC 34) of ISO and IEC. This group has proposed, via the South Korean delegation, to standardize digital rights management (DRM) approaches for electronic books. This project was approved by members of JTC 1/SC 34 earlier this year and a working group is now forming. This work could be an important overlay to the EPUB specification for digital rights and control of eBooks. The project envisions an environment where libraries could simplify their systems integration if there were simpler, more standardized security on those eBook files. How that standardized security and approach is developed could have significant impact on publishers, aggregators, and libraries distributing eBooks around the world. Voting members of NISO are encouraged to nominate experts to this JTC 1/SC 34 working group. Because of the timing of the ballot and the simultaneous launch of NISO as the US Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for this subcommittee in January, NISO members did not vote on the launch of the group. NISO is now in a position to nominate experts to engage in the work, if any members would like to do so. I will be reporting on the ISO meetings, and the outcomes of the TC46 plenary meeting later this month, during our monthly open teleconference on May 21 at 3:00 pm EDT. More information about that program is available here.
Also, related to security and access, I’d also like to draw people’s attention to NISO’s in-person event in Baltimore on May 22 and 23 on Digital Library Access Control and Security. This event will be a terrific learning and discussion experience with a fantastic lineup of speakers focused on the complex world of managing access to subscribed resources. We will be exploring a range of technologies, approaches, and solutions to the challenges of providing simple access to patrons while also providing security and control of intellectual property. This interactive session will include a mix of presentations and group discussions. More information is here.
Finally, I encourage you all to add to your calendars the NISO Annual Meeting, which will be held at the American Library Association in New Orleans on June 23 at 1:00pm CDT. This annual event is our opportunity to describe NISO’s status and future plans. Any questions or topics you would like us to cover are welcome in advance of or during the event. We will be recording it for those that can’t make it in person.
I hope to connect with you at one of these events in the coming weeks.
With kindest regards,
Todd Carpenter
NISO Executive Director
NISO Reports
Media Stories
2018 Internet Health Report
Mozilla, Internet Health Report v.1.0 2018, CC BY 4.0
This report, published by the Mozilla organization under a creative Commons license, notes five key trends in 2018 affecting the 3.57 billion users of the Internet. One key area of concern spotlighted in the report is the issue of privacy and security (including issues of security surrounding the Internet of Things).
College Students Prefer Print for Long-Form Reading, Ebooks for Research
Matt Enis, Library Journal, March 27, 2018
The 2018 Academic Student Ebook Experience Survey, conducted by LJ’s research department and sponsored by EBSCO, documents the preferences of college students for ebooks when doing research (on the basis of a need for “speed of search”) but for print when reading narrative text. Library Journal notes “Laptops and smartphones were, by far, the most popular devices for accessing library ebooks, with an overwhelming majority of students saying that they “always” or “often” use a laptop to access this content (96%), followed by smartphones (48%), desktop computers (22%), or tablets (12%).” Those interested in studying the survey data should register to download the full text of the report.
MIT Libraries Tackles Grand Challenges | Peer to Peer Review
Alexandra Chassanoff, Library Journal, April 12, 2018
Building on a 2016 task force report, The Future of Libraries, a cross section of international experts met during a two-day event hosted by the MIT Libraries to work towards identification of the grand challenges currently facing those operating in the scholarly communication arena. Attendees were broken into three tracks to discuss concerns associated with scholarly discovery, digital preservation and curation, and open scholarship and propose various means for generating more positive outcomes. An anticipated output from the event is a report of summit discussions which will be open for comments. The report will be hosted at https://grandchallenges.pubpub.org
Google’s latest AI experiments let you talk to books and test word association skills
Nick Statt, The Verge, April 13, 2018
Google has opened up two research experiments in their new Semantic Experiences collection. Talk to Books represents a new approach towards delivering responses to queries that might be subjective in nature and therefore elicit varied perspectives in response. Google’s sample queries include such non-specific requests as “What is fun about computer programming?” or “What smell brings back great memories?”. Its novelty in approach is that it does not rely on keyword matching; to some extent, the system mimics the act of browsing a book to determine interest or relevance. The second experiment in artificial intelligence is the game, Semantris, intended to test word association. As the article notes, Semantris “tests your word association abilities as the same software that powers Talk to Books ranks and scores the words on-screen based on how well they correspond to the answers you input.” The article includes links to both the original Google blog posting about the work as well as the full text research article on the project.
Learning Analytics and the Academic Library: Professional Ethics Commitments at a Crossroads
Kyle M.L. Jones, Dorothea Salo, College & Research Libraries, April 2018
Authors Jones and Salo raise concerns about the appropriateness of applying analytics to the collections of data engendered in a variety of online learning management systems in higher education citing, among other issues, concerns regarding patron privacy and intellectual freedom. They note a conflict with the professional Code of Ethics from the American Library Association, and suggest that academic librarians should be involved with and monitor use of learning analytics in order to safeguard the rights of the individual.
New and Proposed Specs and Standards
ISO 9241-11:2018 Ergonomics of human-system interaction -- Part 11: Usability: Definitions and concepts
ISO 9241-11:2018 provides a framework for understanding the concept of usability and applying it to situations where people use interactive systems, and other types of systems (including built environments), and products (including industrial and consumer products) and services (including technical and personal services). ISO 9241-11:2018 explains that usability is an outcome of use; defines key terms and concepts; identifies the fundamentals of usability; and explains the application of the concept of usability. From Technical Committee ISO/TC 159/SC 4, Ergonomics of human-system interaction.
ISO 19165-1:2018 Geographic information -- Preservation of digital data and metadata -- Part 1: Fundamentals
ISO 19165-1:2018 defines the requirements for the long-term preservation of digital geospatial data. These data also include metadata, representation information, provenance, context and any other content items that capture the knowledge that are necessary to fully understand and reuse the archived data. This document also refers to characteristics of data formats that are useful for the purpose of archiving. A geospatial archival information package is fully self-describing and allows a future reconstruction of the dataset without external documentation. ISO 19165-1:2018 defines a preservation metadata extension of ISO 19115‑1. From Technical Committee ISO/TC 211 Geographic information/Geomatics
Call for Review: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 is a W3C Proposed Recommendation
The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. WCAG 2.1 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also often make Web content more usable to users in general. Comments are welcome through 22 May 2018.
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