NISO and UKSG Announce 30 More Publishers Endorse KBART

KBART Phase II Now Focusing on Consortia, Open Access and E-Books

March 21, 2011 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and UKSG are pleased to announce that another 30 publishers are now able to supply metadata that conforms to the recommended practice, KBART: Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (NISO RP-9-2010). Endorsement of this publication, which contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers, indicates that the format and content of data supplied by the publisher to knowledge bases and related tools conform to the KBART recommendations.
The newest endorsers are the American Psychological Association, Edinburgh University Press and the Scitation® platform, which delivers metadata on behalf of 28 society publishers:

Acoustical Society of America
ACS Rubber Division
AHS International - The Vertical Flight Society
American Accounting Association
American Association of Physicists in Medicine
American Association of Physics Teachers
American Astronomical Society
American Society of Civil Engineers
American Society of Mechanical Engineers International
AVS: Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing
Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
Earthquake Engineering Research Institute
Environmental & Engineering Geophysical Society
International Centre for Diffraction Data
IS&T - The Society for Imaging Science & Technology
Laser Institute of America
NACE International
National Association of Geoscience Teachers
Physics Essays Publication
SIAM: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
SPIE
The Electrochemical Society
The Institute of Noise Control Engineering
The Institution of Engineering and Technology
The Society for Information Display
The Society of Exploration Geophysicists
The Society of Rheology
The Tire Society

"By providing a common set of metadata requirements for the information supply chain, KBART helps to reduce the administrative burden of metadata management, and ensures greater visibility and usage of content," explains Terry Hulbert, Director of Business Development at the American Institute of Physics, which developed the Scitation® platform. "In a climate of budget cuts and cancellations, it's an important way for our publisher partners to support their customers and differentiate their content."

"The joint UKSG/NISO KBART Working Group is now focusing on Phase II of the project, which will tackle some of the more advanced issues with knowledge bases in the supply chain," states Sarah Pearson, co-chair of the working group. "The Phase II recommendations will outline additional steps that can be taken by all stakeholders to further improve the library user's experience when using link resolvers and their related knowledge bases, and will specifically address consortia-specific metadata transfer, open access metadata, and enhanced support for e-books and conference proceedings."

For more information on KBART and the current Phase II work, visit www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart.

About KBART
KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) was set up following the 2007 publication of the UKSG research report "Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain." Central to the efficient operation of the OpenURL is the knowledge base, which consists of data supplied by content providers including publishers. The report found that a lack of awareness of the OpenURLs capabilities and requirements is impacting the quality and timeliness of data provided to populate knowledge bases, and thus undermining the potential of the sophisticated OpenURL technology. UKSG partnered with NISO to commission the KBART Working Group to develop guidelines for best practice and provide educational materials. The core NISO/UKSG Working Group consists of representatives from libraries, knowledge base developers, publishers, intermediaries and other content providers, and is supported by a monitoring group of interested parties. Its Phase I report, KBART: Knowledge Bases And Related Tools (NISO RP-9-2010), and guidelines have been widely reviewed and tested by a wider group of information supply chain stakeholders. For more information, visit www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart.

About 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. For more information please contact NISO at (301) 654-2512 or via e-mail at nisohq@niso.org.

About UKSG
UKSG exists to connect the information community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication. It spans the wide range of interests and activities of the extended scholarly information community of librarians, publishers, intermediaries and technology vendors. In a dynamic environment, UKSG works to:

• facilitate community integration, networking, discussion and exchange of ideas,
• improve members' knowledge of the scholarly information sector and support skills development,
• stimulate research and collaborative initiatives, encourage innovation and promote standards for good practice, and
• disseminate news, information and publications, and raise awareness of services that support the scholarly information sector.

For more information, please visit the UKSG website, www.uksg.org.