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UKSG and NISO Announce First Endorsers of KBART Recommended Practice

New KBART Phase II Working Group and Co-Chairs Also Revealed

June 1, 2010 - Baltimore, MD and Newbury, UK - UKSG and NISO are pleased to announce that the American Institute of Physics, Ex Libris, Serials Solutions and OCLC are the first organizations to publicly endorse the Phase I recommendations of the KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working Group, a joint 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. A number of other major organizations in the scholarly information supply chain are also working towards KBART endorsement.
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 now available on the KBART Information Hub at http://www.uksg.org/kbart or http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart where content providers and knowledge base developers can register their organization's information for downloading holdings metadata.

Sarah Pearson, KBART co-chair and E-Resources & Serials Coordinator at the University of Birmingham, comments: "It's an indication of the importance of KBART's work, and the ease with which the Recommended Practice can be adopted, that major knowledge base vendors -- such as Serials Solutions in their KnowledgeWorks program, Ex Libris in their Publisher Relationship Program and OCLC in their WorldCat knowledge base harvesting program -- have already recognized our phase I guidelines. And it's fitting that AIP, which has a history of leadership in journal publishing and reference linking technologies, is the first publisher to provide metadata files that adhere to KBART's recommendations."

The KBART working group is now progressing to Phase II, with a largely new set of volunteers:

  • Andreas Biedenbach, Springer Science+Business Media (NISO co-chair)
  • Sarah Pearson, University of Birmingham (UKSG co-chair)
  • Sherrard Ewing, Serials Solutions
  • Marieke Heins, Swets
  • Chad Hutchens, University of Wyoming
  • Mathew Llewellin, The Royal Society
  • Sheri Meares, EBSCO
  • Paul Moss, OCLC
  • Jason Price, Claremont Colleges / SCELC
  • Rose Robinson, Publishing Technology
  • Liz Stevenson, University of Edinburgh
  • Christine Stohn, Ex Libris
  • Ruth Wells, Taylor & Francis
  • Julie Zhu, American Institute of Physics

New KBART co-chair Andreas Biedenbach, Manager of eProduct Operations for Springer, concludes, "I am pleased to be working with our new Phase II volunteers. We look forward to developing further guidance for all parties involved in e-resource metadata management, which is such a critical part of enabling access to scholarly research."

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 http://www.uksg.org/kbart or http://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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