NISO Releases Draft KBART Automation Recommended Practice for Public Comment
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) seeks comments on a new draft Recommended Practice, KBART Automation: Automated Retrieval of Customer Electronic Holdings. KBART Automation is an enhancement to KBART, Knowledge Bases and Related Tools, the NISO initiative which provides a format for content providers to use to transfer journal and book metadata to link resolver knowledge bases and other library software. This new draft recommended practice provides instructions to support automated feeds customized to include the holdings available at a particular institution, making it much easier for libraries to know their knowledge bases are up to date with their current subscriptions.
"The purpose of the KBART Automation initiative is to facilitate the retrieval of KBART Holdings Reports, which are customized files representing an institution’s holdings at a given time, typically maintained by the content provider in any case," notes Oliver Pesch, Chief Product Strategist at EBSCO Information Services and co-chair of the KBART Automation Working Group. “Besides providing focus on specific KBART fields to be transmitted automatically, the draft Recommended Practice describes elements of an Application Programming Interface (API) the content provider would support to enable interaction with the knowledge base provider."
“KBART Automation will benefit many parties, certainly including libraries, by reducing their workload to keep their data updated. We also expect it will help content providers, who will see that more timely and accurate activation of their content will result in increased usage,” adds Stephanie Doellinger, Knowledge base Data Ingest Section Manager at OCLC, the other co-chair of the KBART Automation Working Group. “Working group members are looking forward to receiving comments from the NISO community on this draft document, which will enable us to be sure it will be complete for publication early next year, as well as provide us with further input for future phases of this work.”
"KBART has been one of the more successful NISO initiatives in recent years," comments Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director for Programs. "We are pleased that the NISO community members have stepped forward to collaborate on this enhancement. The NISO KBART Standing Committee will be considering the input from the KBART Automation Working Group, among other information, as it moves forward to keep KBART up-to-date. In the meantime the KBART Automation Recommended Practice will be published separately, after the Working Group addresses the comments received.”
The NISO KBART Automation: Automated Retrieval of Customer Electronic Holdings Recommended Practice is available for public comment from November 2 to December 3, 2018. To download the draft document or submit comments, visit the NISO project page at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/kbart/kbart-automation. All input is welcome.
About NISO
NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, 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 information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website.
