Co-chairs: Pascal Calarco (University of Windsor); Peter Murray (The Cherry Hill Company)
Access and License Indicators Working Group
Co-chairs: Ed Pentz (Crossref), Cameron Neylon (Curtin University; formerly of PLOS), Greg Tananbaum (SPARC)
Access and License Indicators Workroom
Access and License Indicators Recommended Practice (NISO RP-22-2015)
The Access and License Indicators Working Group, initially known as the Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group, published its Recommended Practice in early 2015. This document defines a structure for standardized bibliographic metadata to describe the accessibility of journal articles as well as describes how "open" the item is via tagging to link to the item's license terms. The Recommended Practice is meant to provide a solution to the problem where many offerings are available from publishers under the banner of Open Access (OA), Increased Access, Public Access, or other descriptions, and the terms offered vary between publishers and, in some cases, based on the funding organization of the author. A number of publishers also offer hybrid options in which some articles are "open" while the rest of the journal's content is available only by subscription or license, and no standardized bibliographic metadata currently provides information on whether a specific article is freely readable and what re-use rights might be available to readers.
Along with the published Recommended Practice, the ALI schema is available along with code samples illustrating several of the use cases documented in a Recommended Practice appendix. Also, support for JATS has been included in the latest publication of ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite 1.1.
NISO intends that a Standing Committee will manage education, promotion, and further adjudication of potential updates to the Recommended Practice. If you are interested in potential participation in this group, please contact Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director of Programs (nlagace@niso.org). To follow the work of this group, subscribe to the OA Indicators mailing list.
Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (KBART) Standing Committee
Co-chairs: Magaly Bascones (JISC), Ben Johnson (ProQuest)
Contact KBART Chairs for endorsement approval
Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2014)
The KBART Recommended Practice, published in 2014 by NISO, builds on the recommendations of the first version of the recommended practice to specifically address areas of metadata for e-books and conference proceedings, packages licensed via consortia deals, and describe how open access metadata might be published and shared in knowledge bases while continuing to supply a format for general transfer of journal data to the knowledge base of a link resolver supplier. The KBART Standing Committee provides support and education activities for KBART and is working now on streamlining publisher approval for inclusion in the KBART Registry, which includes details of contacts, URLs, and instructions relating to the transfer of e-resource metadata between content providers and link resolvers. All KBART registrants are requested to update their endorsement details pursuant to the new recommendations.
The Standing Committee is also reviewing its educational materials, updating these, and seeking new opportunities to present these to potential KBART audiences. Notably, a preconference on KBART, "Deep Dive into KBART," was presented by Standing Committee members at the NASIG Annual Conference in Albuquerque in June, following its successful "premiere" at the Charleston Conference in November. The Standing Committee is now considering how this material could continue to be communicated, perhaps via a future NISO webinar. Marlene Van Ballegooie, Standing Committee member, also presented on KBART at the NISO Update at ALA Annual in Orlando, FL in June.
To follow the group's activities, subscribe to the KBART interest mailing list.
NCIP (NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol) Standing Committee
Chair: Mike Dicus (Ex Libris)
ANSI/NISO Z39.83-1-2012 (version 2.02), NISO Circulation Interchange - Part 1: Protocol (NCIP)
The NCIP Standing Committee operates via Continuous Maintenance procedures to manage the latest NCIP standard, version 2.02, which was published in 2012. Each month the committee holds conference calls to reviews status of implementations and discuss other general business, such as additions to the NCIP website and implementor questions. Meetings have been held in person at least once a year in order to review any ongoing updates to the NCIP protocol per the Standing Committee's continuous maintenance procedure and to discuss other related issues of interest to the members of the Standing Committee. Input from the public is welcome.
The Standing Committee is recommending that the standard published in 2012should be reaffirmed by NISO Voting Members, per ANSI requirements for standards under continuous maintenance, and then moved to periodic maintenance as many other ANSI/NISO standards are managed.
Open Discovery Initiative Standing Committee
Co-chairs: Rachel Kessler (Ex Libris), Laura Morse (Harvard University)
ODI Recommended Practice (NISO RP-19-2014)
The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) Recommended Practice, published in June 2014, is directed toward the new generation of library discovery services that are based on indexed search. The published document includes background on the discovery landscape, recommendations in the areas of technical formats for data format and data transfer; communication of libraries' rights regarding specific content; descriptors regarding particular levels of indexing for content; definition of fair linking to published content; and determination of appropriate usage statistics to be collected to address stakeholder needs. The ODI Standing Committee supports and publicizes ODI, and monitors the discovery landscape to determine whether and when further recommendations should be studied and written.
The ODI Standing Committee is working to further publicize and communicate vendor conformance statements and other general ODI issues and metrics and has published a brochure describing these. Further initiatives include outreach to A&I vendors; creating additional tools for librarians; outreach to discovery service providers; and following up on outcomes from the NISO October forum around the Future of Library Resource Discovery (which itself was an outcome of the NISO white paper, The Future of Library Resource Discovery). The Standing Committee has added new "librarian talking points" to its website, to help increase vendor conformance, and has been discussing value propositions to help communicate the ODI message as clearly as possible.
The ODI Standing Committee posts periodic updates on its work to the ODI observer mailing list; any interested observer may join this list. A Twitter account, @NISO_ODI can also be followed.
Ken Varnum of the Standing Committee presented at ALA Annual in Orlando , sponsored by ALCTS. Elise Sassone of the Standing Committee also presented at ALA Annual in Orlando, as part of the NISO Update.
ResourceSync Working Group
Co-chairs: Todd Carpenter (NISO), Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2014, ResourceSync Framework Specification
ResourceSync, a specification which describes a synchronization framework for the web consisting of various capabilities that allow third party systems to remain synchronized with a server's evolving resources, was formally approved by ANSI and published in May 2014 as ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2014. The core ResourceSync group was funded by the Sloan Foundation and was augmented by other industry and research participants, some of whom were sponsored by Jisc.
The problem that ResourceSync was designed to solve spans the areas of search, discovery, deposit, metadata harvesting, and transfer; there is a need to keep collections of resources in sync so that additions, updates, and deletions of one are reflected in the other. The ResourceSync standard was written in such a way that individual capabilities could be combined to meet local requirements. A server may also describe synchronization capabilities that it supports and means through which third party systems may discover this support. The core functionality of the specification is intended to represent a functional replacement of OAI-PMH. (Other features, such as change notification, framework notification, and archive capabilities are published through separate documents, not currently part of the material part of NISO/ANSI standardization.)
The ResourceSync standard is currently undergoing some updating to address an issue regarding communication of dates for change notification versus those stored for latest modification. It is expected that the draft specification will soon be put before the NISO Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee for its approval ahead of NISO Voting Member approval and subsequent ANSI approval and publication.
A quick overview of ResourceSync, via YouTube, is available at http://youtu.be/ASQ4jMYytsA and also via the group's NISO webpage.
Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) Working Group
Co-chairs: John Bodfish (OCLC), Ted Koppel (Auto-Graphics)
Introduced by 3M in 1993, the Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) provides a standard communication mechanism that allows Integrated Library System (ILS) applications and self-service devices to communicate seamlessly to perform self-service transactions. It has become the de facto standard around the world to integrate ILSs and self-service devices. This NISO Working Group has been directing the existing SIP version 3.0 specification through the NISO standardization process.
Four important high-level areas have guided the group's work: the SIP3 documents themselves, including revisions/corrections/additions, resolving ambiguities, etc.; the Maintenance Agency; SIP3's relation to privacy standards and security; and the relation to NCIP. The group met approximately bi-weekly during 2013 to work through these areas; much of the discussion concerned the extensive research and analysis that was done by Working Group members to help progress decision-making. There have been some delays unrelated to the specification itself, but NISO staff and the Working Group are continuing the final work to determine the changes and edits that need to be made to the proposed standard and associated documents pursuant to the group decisions from these meetings, in order to publish a Draft Standard for Trial Use.
Following the completion of the documents, the Working Group intends to address questions of compliance, certification, and assured interoperability. Updated materials in conjunction with the group's work will be added to its Workroom page as they are finalized.
Tracking Link Origins in Networked Information Environments
Proposed co-chairs: Ken Varnum (University of Michigan), Gary Pollack (EBSCO Information Services)
Tracking Link Origins New Work Item Proposal
This project, approved by NISO Voting Members earlier this year, aims to develop a NISO Recommended Practice to help libraries, publishers, and other content providers to accurately track the sites/platforms from which incoming links originate when they pass through a link resolver. Where content hosts utilize HTTP analysis to determine where users started research, links coming from link resolvers will represent the domain of the link resolver and not that of the platform where the user originated his/her search.
The Working Group --expected to be formally approved by the Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee as part of its September meeting-- is beginning its investigation of options for passing the link origin information to publishers and implementation of one or more proof-of-concept projects to demonstrate proposed techniques.