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NISO and UKSG Announce Five More Publishers Endorse KBART

Metadata in OpenURL knowledge bases improved through implementation of KBART recommendations

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the UKSG are pleased to announce that BioOne, JSTOR, LOCKSS, the Royal Society of Chemistry and SpringerLink (hosted by Metapress) are the most recent organizations to publicly endorse the Phase I recommendations of the KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working Group, a joint NISO/UKSG initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain. KBART's Phase I Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2010), published in January 2010, contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.
All content providers, from major databases to small publishers, are encouraged to publicly endorse the KBART Recommended Practice by submitting a sample file to the KBART working group. Once the file's format and content has been reviewed and approved, and the provider has made it publicly available (in line with the recommendations), the provider will be added to a public list of endorsing providers. Knowledge base developers can endorse the KBART Recommended Practice by confirming that their systems can process KBART formatted files. In addition, a contacts registry is available on the KBART Information Hub at www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart where content providers and knowledge base developers can register their organization's information for downloading holdings metadata.

Sarah Price, KBART Co-chair and E-Resources & Serials Coordinator at the University of Birmingham, comments: "It's really encouraging from both a KBART and library perspective to see the uptake of the KBART recommendations from content providers. It demonstrates the commitment to improving metadata to aid discovery which in turn will benefit the whole community through increased usage, ease of discovery and user satisfaction."

The KBART working group is now progressing towards the end of Phase II and is focusing on enhancing the current recommendations with new guidelines for eBook, consortia and Open Access metadata.

KBART Co-chair Andreas Biedenbach, Independent Publishing Professional, concludes, "I am very pleased with the interest we have raised for our working group. It is encouraging that we find more and more organizations endorsing our recommendations and that we were able to add these renowned companies to our endorsement list this month. We look forward to collaborating with further parties involved in the e-resource metadata management in the near future and to the upcoming tasks in connection with our Phase II work."

For more information on endorsement, to review the KBART Recommended Practice, or to find out how to get involved in future phases of KBART's work, please visit www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart.

About NISO
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org. For more information please contact NISO at (301) 654-2512 or via e-mail at nisohq@niso.org.

About UKSG
UKSG exists to connect the information community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication. It spans the wide range of interests and activities of the extended scholarly information community of librarians, publishers, intermediaries and technology vendors. In a dynamic environment, UKSG works to:

  • facilitate community integration, networking, discussion and exchange of ideas,
  • improve members' knowledge of the scholarly information sector and support skills development,
  • stimulate research and collaborative initiatives, encourage innovation and promote standards for good practice, and
  • disseminate news, information and publications, and raise awareness of services that support the scholarly information sector.

For more information, please visit the UKSG website, www.uksg.org.

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