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NISO and UKSG Announce Five New KBART Endorsements

Registry of relevant contacts within stakeholder organizations also growing

September 16, 2010 - NISO and UKSG are pleased to announce the addition of five new organizations as official endorsers of the joint recommended practice, KBART: Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (NISO RP-9-2010). This Phase I publication, published in January 2010, contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.
The most recent organizations to endorse KBART are: Alexander Street Press; Annual Reviews; EBSCO Information Services; Innovative Interfaces, Inc.; and Royal Society Publishing. These companies join the American Institute of Physics, Ex Libris, OCLC, and Serials Solutions on the list of formal endorsers. 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, at kbart@niso.org. Endorsement is finalized 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).

Sarah Pearson, E-Resources & Serials Coordinator at the University of Birmingham and UKSG co-chair of the KBART Phase II Working Group, stated, "The joint NISO/UKSG working group is very pleased that the uptake of the recommendations is gathering momentum, as evidenced by the growth of formal KBART endorsements. We have been actively working to promote the benefits of implementing the recommendations, and are thrilled to see that our message is getting through. We look forward to seeing more progress in the future."

KBART has also made a contacts registry available for content providers and knowledge base developers to register their organization's information for downloading holdings metadata. The registry provides a list of contacts, URLs, and instructions relating to the transfer of e-resource metadata between content providers and link resolvers. Companies that have formally endorsed KBART are marked with a KBART logo on the registry.

KBART's Phase II work is underway to develop a second recommended practice that will build on the Phase I recommendations. Knowledge base providers and their customers (primarily academic libraries) will benefit from provision of higher quality data by content providers. Publishers will benefit from accurate linking to their content and subsequently the possibility of increased usage.

For more information on KBART and the current Phase II work, visit www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart.

About KBART
KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) was set up following the 2007 publication of the UKSG research report "Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain." Central to the efficient operation of the OpenURL is the knowledge base, which consists of data supplied by content providers including publishers. The report found that a lack of awareness of the OpenURLs capabilities and requirements is impacting the quality and timeliness of data provided to populate knowledge bases, and thus undermining the potential of the sophisticated OpenURL technology. UKSG partnered with NISO to commission the KBART Working Group to develop guidelines for best practice and provide educational materials. The core NISO/UKSG Working Group consists of representatives from libraries, knowledge base developers, publishers, intermediaries and other content providers, and is supported by a monitoring group of interested parties. Its Phase I report, KBART: Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (NISO RP-9-2010), and guidelines have been widely reviewed and tested by a wider group of information supply chain stakeholders. For more information, 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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