NISO Launches Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) Standing Committee

Comments and suggestions welcome for maintenance and promotion of the recommended practice

Baltimore, MD - October 27, 2014 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is pleased to announce the next phase for the Open Discovery Initiative, a project that explores community interactions in the realm of indexed discovery services. Following the working group's recommendation to create an ongoing standing committee as outlined in the published recommended practice, Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery (NISO RP-19-2014), NISO has formed a new standing committee reflecting a balance of stakeholders, with member representation from content providers, discovery providers, and libraries. The ODI Standing Committee will promote education about adoption of the ODI Recommended Practice, provide support for content providers and discovery providers during adoption, conduct a forum for ongoing discussion related to all aspects of discovery platforms for all stakeholders, and determine timing for additional actions that were outlined in the recommended practice.
"Discovery systems are critical to the research ecosystem," states Laura Morse, ODI Standing Committee Co-chair and Director, Library Systems, Harvard University. "Working with content and discovery providers to ensure that all content, whether it is licensed or openly available, can be discovered by library users regardless of the institution's choice of discovery system is core to supporting research, teaching, and learning. The ODI Standing Committee will build on the work of the original ODI Working Group to promote content neutrality and the widespread adoption of all tenets of the recommended practice by discovery service providers, content providers, and libraries."

"The ODI Recommended Practice provides a rich framework within which content providers and discovery service suppliers can drive collaborative improvements toward a smooth and comprehensive library search experience," states Lettie Conrad, ODI Standing Committee Co-chair and Executive Manager, Online Products, SAGE. "We must work together across the industry to fully realize the vision of indexed discovery services, which is made possible by NISO's leadership and guidance through the standards formation process. The Standing Committee invites suggestions from the community on how we can best promote and enable adoption of the NISO ODI Recommended Practice"

"Uptake of NISO's recommendations is always aided when community members are willing to continue working together as a Standing Committee," explains Nettie Lagace, Associate Director for Programs at NISO. "As stakeholders utilize the NISO documents and discuss potential areas of further work, the benefits of relying on a group of their peers to educate them and provide support cannot be underestimated. NISO is grateful to the members of the Standing Committee for contributing their time to these ongoing efforts."

More information about the ODI Standing Committee and the Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery (NISO RP-19-2014) recommended practice are available from the Open Discovery Initiative webpage on the NISO website at: www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/. You may join the ODI Interest Group e-mail list at: www.niso.org/lists/opendiscovery/. To provide input on promotion, adoption, and maintenance of the recommended practice, send an e-mail to odi@niso.org.

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.