Working Group Connection, September 2024: Projects via Information Policy & Analysis Topic Committee
Co-chairs of the IPA topic committee are: Todd Digby (University of Florida) and Jessica Thibodeau (Copyright Clearance Center).
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM)
Co-chairs: Bill Kasdorf (Kasdorf and Associates, LLC.), J. Stephen Downie (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jacob Jett (Association of State Floodplain Managers)
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Webpage
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
Many books, articles, videos, and other resources are often inaccessible or not sufficiently accessible to people with perceptual, cognitive, physical, or other disabilities. Schools, colleges, and universities are typically required by law to provide accessible versions of resources that students need. Similarly, government documents and other resources in the United States and elsewhere are required to be accessible. Unfortunately, most published resources are not yet provided by their publishers in fully accessible forms. This requires what is known as remediation: acquiring a publication in some available format and altering it to make it accessible, typically to a single individual needing a particular type of remediation.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project, "FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Education," was formed to eliminate redundant work and facilitate the sharing of remediated resources. As no standard metadata describing the process and results of remediation for accessibility in sufficient detail existed, the FRAME metadata model was developed to enable both discovery and deposit functions.
The Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group will extend and refine the FRAME metadata model to meet the needs of the broader accessibility community, focused on individuals and organizations involved in the remediation of content for accessibility and the consumption of remediated content. This work will include writing documentation that clearly defines and describes the properties in the model, the values they can use, and the relationships between them, and developing a schema that enables validation of content conformance to the model.
The working group is continuing its information gathering phase. The two initial subgroups, Resource Sharing and Non-print Disabilities, have completed their work, and the next set of subgroups, Higher Education and Primary/Secondary Education, began their work in June and July, respectively. The Higher Education and Primary/Secondary Education subgroups will focus on issues specific to the remediation of content in college/university and K–12 environments. As of September 2024, the Higher Education subgroup has completed its work, and the next subgroup, Non-Text Media, will begin its work in late September. The Non-Text Media subgroup will explore how formats such as audio, video, and animations fit into the ARM model.
Richard Urban of OCLC, Working Group Member, presented on ARM at the NISO Standards Update at the ALA Annual Conference in San Diego in June. ARM was featured in the May NISO Open Teleconference, with co-chairs J. Stephen Downie and Bill Kasdorf presenting. Bill Kasdorf contributed an article about ARM and FRAME to the April issue of Against The Grain. Bill Kasdorf also presented an update on the group's activities during the Working Group Update #1 session at the NISO Plus Global/Online conference in September.
Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) Working Groups
Acquisitions Working Group
Co-Chairs: Jesse Koennecke (Cornell University), Russell Michalak (Goldey-Beacom College)
Assessment/Data Analysis Working Group
Co-Chairs: Anne Larrivee (West Chester University of Pennsylvania), Jharina Pascual (University of California, Irvine)
Cataloging/Metadata Working Group
Co-Chairs: Gaëlle Bequet (ISSN International Centre), Jeanette Norris (Yale University)
Collections Development and Selection Working Group
Co-chairs: Eva Jurczyk (University of Toronto), Bill Maltarich (New York University)
Consortia
Co-Chairs: Charlie Barlow (Boston Library Consortium), Robin Hastings (Northeast Kansas Library System (NEKLS)
Infrastructure Working Group
Co-chairs: Rob Cartolano (Columbia University Libraries), Kris Maloney (Big10 Academic Alliance (BTAA), Rutgers University)
Organizational Strategy and Governance Working Group
Co-chairs: Mike Gorrell (Index Data), Boaz Nadav-Manes (Lehigh University)
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
CCLP Project Web Site
CCLIP Working Groups, part of the IMLS-funded Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project, will develop a NISO Recommended Practice, based on an open standards architecture, that will support the flow of data about distinct library collections. The Recommended Practice will document exchange protocols that will describe gathering, normalizing, and exchanging holdings information, contractual information, retention obligations, and usage data. The CCLIP model will also include aggregation of library staff and subject matter expertise, local/consortial/group-based insights, and publisher/marketplace information necessary to support collaborative decisions at both the local and cross-institutional levels.
Initial planned CCLP applications based on these recommendations may include: A) An aggregated shared index and knowledge base in which libraries/publishers can share data about their collections and expertise; B) A discovery mechanism for library staff to support searching and browsing for content, information, and human resources; C) A communication application that will support interactions across institutions; D) Data aggregation, visualization, and reporting; E) Negotiation and group purchasing decision support protocols. The group will also review existing standards and protocols for the exchange of this information and, wherever possible, will adapt these extant best practices to this process, or recommend additional changes to those existing specifications.
The first of the third and final cohort of CCLIP working groups, the Consortia Working Group, began meeting in September. The Consortia group is charged with developing guidance for consortial needs in a complex collaborative collections lifecycle. The Collections Development and Selection, Infrastructure, and Organizational Strategy and Governance Working Groups have now completed their portion of the draft for the greater Recommended Practice, and their work has been brought to a close. A call for volunteers to participate in the final working group, aimed at engaging vendors, is scheduled to begin later in Fall 2024.
Project Co-PIs Todd Carpenter and Boaz Nadav-Manes, along with Steering Committee and Infrastructure Working Group member Sebastian Hammer, presented the project at the American Library Association Annual Conference in June. An update on the group’s current progress and next steps was presented by project Co-PI Todd Carpenter at NISO Plus Global/Online in September.
Content Platform Migrations Working Group
Working Group Web page
Publication: RP-38-2021, Content Platform Migrations
NISO published this recommended practice in November 2021. This effort focused on improving communications between stakeholders when a publisher moves content from one hosting platform to another. The document lists the core concepts, approaches, and tasks to facilitate a successful migration with minimal disruption to the libraries and other vendors affected, as well as the publisher itself and the content platform vendors. Ultimately, end users enjoy the most benefit from stakeholder adoption of the principles outlined in the Recommended Practice, as their access to necessary content is unimpeded.
The main document provides context, descriptions, and definitions. Each section concludes with recommendations related to each topic, with bulleted lists of example tasks for each stakeholder group. The recommendations are also provided as a Checklist in a spreadsheet, so they can be sorted, filtered, and customized. Both versions of the Recommendations identify the stakeholder that is likely to have responsibility for a given task.
A NISO Standing Committee will take over the work of promotion and support of the Recommended Practice. If you are interested in participating, please contact nisohq@niso.org.
Open Access Business Processes (OA Business Processes)
Co-chairs: Yvonne Campfens (OA Switchboard), Amanda Holmes (CRKN)
OABP Working Group Web page
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
The increasing adoption of OA policies and mandates has shifted strategy and business practices in libraries, scholarly publishing entities, and associated organizations. Meanwhile, the operationalization of financial transactions, compliance tracking with different policies, and related workflows has yet to be normalized. In the absence of established best practices there exists a sundry assortment of individualized solutions in libraries and publishers that rely heavily on publishers' workflows, systems, dashboards, invoices, and data. A number of organizations have defined local workflows to facilitate work but a shared recommendation would be of benefit to the entire community.
The Open Access Business Processes (OABP) Working Group began meeting late in 2023 and is developing a Recommended Practice on operationalizing OA business practices. As part of this effort the working group is conducting a landscape analysis on current OA business processes and take into consideration current gaps in the infrastructure and needed protocols for data exchange. Summer 2024 saw several subgroups meeting regularly to document existing stakeholder workflows in preparation to determine a "recommended" workflow, discuss current business models and their effects on vocabularies, and population of a metadata and metrics list to provide a foothold on definitions and schema construction. Work continues into the fall to bring the threads together and chart out an outline for the draft recommendations.
Public presentations about OABP included the Society for Scholarly Publishing annual meeting in Boston in May, an update at the NISO Standards Update at the ALA Annual Conference in San Diego in June. OABP will also be presented as a Lively Conversation session at the Charleston Conference in November.
Seamless Access
NISO provides support and expertise to the Seamless Access project in the form of leadership on several working groups and membership on the governance committee of the project. SeamlessAccess is designed to enable a more streamlined access experience for federated authentication across scholarly and research information infrastructures, and works to make all of federated authentication a better experience for users.
Since our last update in September, the Seamless Access project has continued to work with browser vendors and community working groups in the creation of new technology in response to upcoming major browser vendor changes. With all major browsers beginning their deprecation of third party cookies, SeamlessAccess is now in testing of one possible solution for this issue, and is currently calling all integrators to participate in deprecation trial for unpartitioned third-party storage. As a part of this work with browser vendors, SeamlessAccess is continuing to try and ensure that the browser developers are aware of the special challenges of the research environment and are working to help mitigate issues that might emerge from upcoming browser changes. The project is also preparing a release that implements IdP filtering for service providers, a much-requested feature that will allow important expansion of the project to move forward.
The project has also been busy working on the development of an Access Audit Toolkit, designed to help organizations determine how robust their authentication and authorization systems are in a selection of specific areas. You can watch a presentation on this work from the Charleston Conference here, and more information will be released soon. Along with this work, there is ongoing work to simplify and clarify the SeamlessAccess.org website, and those changes will be rolled out over the next six months.
SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) Standing Committee
SERU Standing Committee Web page
Publication: SERU Recommended Practice (NISO RP-7-2012)
The SERU Recommended Practice was updated in 2012 to be more flexible for use with online products beyond e-journals, and is supported by its Standing Committee who works to publicize SERU and educate libraries and publishers via direct contacts and public presentations at industry conferences. The SERU website pages are available to help publishers and libraries understand and use the SERU material and NISO continues to add more libraries and publishers to the SERU Registry upon request.
Transfer Standing Committee
Co-chairs: Sophia Anderton (BJU International), Emilie Lavallée-Funston (University of Stirling)
Transfer Standing Committee Web page
Publication: Transfer Recommended Practice (NISO RP-24-2019)
The most recent version of the Transfer Code of Practice, Version 4 was published in 2019. Transfer helps publishers ensure that content remains accessible by readers and librarians when a journal or set of journals is transferred between parties, and supports a smooth process with minimal disruption. Publishers are asked to endorse the Code of Practice and to abide by its principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so. Supporting publishers are included in a list of endorsers on the Transfer website. The Transfer Alerting Service, sponsored by the ISSN Agency, facilitates communication about journal transfers and includes a database where details about transfers can be searched.
The members of the Transfer Standing Committee, who meet bi-monthly, are responsible for encouraging publisher endorsement and planning outreach, education and training activities. These continue at industry conferences where members meet publishers in person and talk to them about Transfer directly.
Since last year, the Standing Committee has been immersed in subgroup discussions around the next version of Transfer, reviewing new use scenarios--such as those involving open access details, such as transformative agreements--and inspecting Transfer elements and procedures that may need to be updated in light of these industry development. New text continues to be developed and reviewed; a draft Transfer version 5 may be available for public comment early in 2025.
Former Standing Committee co-chair Linda Wobbe presented on Transfer as part of the NISO Standards Update at the ALA Annual Conference in San Diego in June.
Z39.7 Data Dictionary Standing Committee
Co-chairs: Martha Kyrillidou (QualityMetrics), Joe Zucca (University of Pennsylvania)
Z39.7 Standing Committee
The purpose of ANSI/NISO Z39.7-2013 Information Services and Use: Metrics & Statistics for Libraries and Information Providers - Data Dictionary is to assist the information community by indicating and defining useful quantifiable information to measure the resources and performance of libraries and to provide a body of valid and comparable data on American libraries. It identifies standard definitions, methods, and practices relevant to library statistics activities in the United States. Any user of the online standard may submit suggested changes which are then reviewed by the Standing Committee during its conference calls. As part of its work, the Standing Committee scans and reviews the statistical survey landscape and examines other assessment efforts--including use of particular vocabularies--in the community for effects on the Data Dictionary.
The Z39.7 Standing Committee has finalized a new draft of the standard. It is expected that this updated draft will be made available to NISO Voting Members for their approval in the coming months and subsequently presented to ANSI for its approval prior to NISO publication. In the meantime, the Standing Committee has assembled resources for a separate appendix to the standard which will capture ongoing work (projects and tools) related to assessment and has been discussing recent meetings of interest and updates to various industry surveys.
New Project: U.S. National PID Strategy
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
NISO Voting members have approved the formation of a Working Group to develop an ANSI/NISO standard for a United States national PID strategy, which will increase the adoption of PIDs and provide critical support to open research. NISO is currently seeking members from across the information community, including representatives from federal agencies, PID providers, academic libraries, publishers, and software providers, to join the resulting Working Group.
Persistent identifiers, or PIDs, are a critical part of the infrastructure supporting scholarly communications and open research. They support research discovery and citations, allow users and systems to easily identify authors and institutions and link them to research outputs, and help ensure compliance with a growing number of government and funder mandates advancing open scholarship. To date, however, approaches to encouraging the adoption of PIDs and investment in PID infrastructure have not been coordinated, and there is little guidance available on how best to improve the implementation and efficacy of PIDs within the diverse spheres of the US research landscape. The Open Research Funders Group, building on work first begun by the Research Data Alliance, released a report, “Developing a US National PID Strategy,” in the spring of 2024. The report highlighted the need for a strategy that would build support for PIDs, increase their adoption, and help stakeholders to incorporate them into workflows and systems more easily. NISO’s Working Group will be dedicated to meeting these needs, developing a standard advancing PIDs and open scholarship.
NISO expects to convene the working group during September for startup in October. For more information contact nisohq@niso.org.
New Project: Unique Electronic Resource Package Identifiers
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
E-resources are frequently purchased as packages, which can range in size from a handful of titles to hundreds of thousands. Currently, these packages can only be identified by their name in the supply chain, within elements such as invoices, publisher websites, knowledge bases, etc. However, names are inherently ambiguous, so this causes problems that affect all stakeholders—libraries, content providers and platforms, knowledge base providers, and even users.
The NISO Unique Electronic Resource Package Identifiers Working Group will evaluate and create recommendations for a unique identifier to enable disambiguation between packages, which can be used across the supply chain. This identifier will allow all stakeholders to streamline and simplify their processes, and to more easily track changes. It will also provide libraries with clear information about which titles a package contains, enabling them, for example, to manage claims when journals move between publishers.
NISO expects to convene the working group later this year. For more information contact nisohq@niso.org.