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NISO Discovery Tools Forum Provided Vision and Solutions

Baltimore, MD - March 31, 2008 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) concluded its two-day forum, "Next Generation Discovery: New Tools, Aging Standards," on March 28 in Chapel Hill, NC. Speakers focused on the fact that new sources of scholarly information have engendered the need for effective search-driven and network-driven discovery tools, and looked at the role of standards in the development of those tools.
Richard Akerman offered the opening keynote entitled "Building SkyNet for Science: Discovering New Frontiers Using Embedded Knowledge." Akerman is a Technology Architect at the National Research Council, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC CISTI), Canada's National Science Library and Publisher. He noted that discovery in the digital environment is primarily mediated by machines; unfortunately, the machines don't speak the same language as their creators. A key challenge, therefore, is finding standard ways of representing and communicating requests, and standards for embedding and exchanging knowledge about digital objects.

The following experts also offered their visions and insights:

  • Robert J. Sandusky, Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology, Clinical Associate Professor, Richard J. Daley Library,
    University of Illinois at Chicago, discussed "Deep Indexing and Discovery of Tables and Figures." Deep indexing refers to the capability of discovering information objects at new, finer levels of granularity.
  • Mike Teets, Vice President, Global Engineering, OCLC, talked about "Identities, xISBN, and xISSN."
  • Ralph LeVan, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC, covered "Search Web Service." The Search Web Service group was formed to propose new search standards based on the experience gained with NISO/ANSI Z39.50, SRU and OpenSearch. That group has developed the concept of an abstract retrieval protocol, is developing bindings from concrete protocols to the abstract protocol and is developing a non-prescriptive standard based on a description language that allows content providers a way to describe how to interact with their systems with a high level of interoperability.
  • Camelia Csora, Product Manager, ScienceDirect and 2collab, Elsevier,
    addressed "2collab: A Collaboration Tool for Researchers and Scientists." 2collab is an online collaboration tool for researchers and scientists.
  • Vinod Chachra, President & CEO, VTLS Inc., looked at "Improving Discovery Systems Through Post Processing of Harvested Data."
  • Karen Hawkins, Director of Product Management, IEEE, presented "Scitopia.org: A Discovery Tool Using Federated Search." Scitopia.org began as a partnership among 15 (now grown to 20) scientific and technical
    societies. It enables end-users to focus a search on content that is society generated, and mainly peer-reviewed.
  • Peter Murray, Assistant Director, New Service Development, OhioLINK, covered "Discovery Tools and the OPAC."
  • John G. Dove, Chief Executive Officer, Credo Reference, presented "A Model of the User's Psychological State as a Framework for Understanding the Nexus of What's Desirable and What's Possible in the Future of Online
    Reference.
  • Dinah Sanders, Senior Product Manager, Encore, Innovative Interfaces, Inc. covered "Changing Patron Expectations and the Discovery Landscape."
  • Michael Winkler, Director of Information Technologies & Digital Development (iTadd), University of Pennsylvania, discussed "PennTags: Social Discovery & Organization." PennTags is a social tagging application
    developed at the University of Pennsylvania to support research, teaching,and learning in an academic environment.
  • John Mark Ockerbloom, Digital Library Architect and Planner, University of Pennsylvania, explored "ILS and Discovery Systems: A DLF Update."
  • Dave Munger, Freelance Writer and Co-Founder, ResearchBlogging.org and Eric Schnell, Associate Professor and Assistant Director for Technology and Digital Initiatives, Prior Health Sciences Library, The Ohio State University, looked at "ResearchBlogging.org: A Peer Review Research Discovery System."

Ex Libris, EBSCO, and Innovative Interfaces provided sponsorship for the forum, which was held at the Friday Center on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

NISO's next forum is May 5-6: Digital Resources: Working with Formats Beyond
Serials in San Francisco, CA.

About the National Information Standards Organization (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.

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