Bethesda, MD - May 24, 2007 - With support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has launched a Working Group to produce the third edition of A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. The Framework establishes principles for creating, managing, and preserving digital collections, digital objects, metadata, and projects. It also provides links to relevant standards that support the principles and additional resources.
"Museums and libraries are creating and acquiring vast amounts of digital content. The Framework provides guidance on best practices and promotes the use of standards to help ensure that this digital content can be easily accessed and used by everyone worldwide," said Anne-Imelda Radice, Ph.D., director of the IMLS. IMLS is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas (www.imls.gov).
"The third edition of the Framework will not only bring it up-to-date, but will also improve coverage of non-text formats, international initiatives, digital preservation, Web 2.0 concepts, and several other areas of interest," explained Priscilla Caplan, Assistant Director for Digital Library Services at the Florida Center for Library Automation. Caplan will serve as Chair of the Committee that also includes Grace Agnew, Rutgers University; Murtha Bacca, ArtStor; Tony Gill, Center for Jewish History; Carl Fleischhauer, Library of Congress; Ingrid Hsieh-Yee, The Catholic University of America; and Christie Stephenson, American Museum.
"At the same time," Caplan continued, "we will turn the Framework into a community-maintained resource, so that anyone with expertise can suggest new links, add annotations, and participate in discussions about the content."
The Framework was initially developed in 2000 (first edition) and revised in 2004 (second edition).
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 life cycle of an information standard. NISO (www.niso.org) 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.