Information Standards Quarterly, Spring 2013

The Year in Review issue of ISQ along with the NISO Annual Meeting and Standards Update at ALA Midwinter in January each year provide opportunities for me to reflect on all the accomplishments NISO has made in the previous year. Nothing NISO accomplishes could have happened without the tremendous efforts and support of our community of volunteers. The successes of the past year are a perfect example of that and as an organization we have much to be proud of.

We continued in 2012 our very active standards and recommended practices development pipeline with more than 20 active projects. Several groups completed their work, resulting in the publication of two new standards (JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite and Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification), two new recommended practices (Physical Delivery of Library Resources and COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile), two recommended practice revisions (RFID in U.S. Libraries and SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding), and one white paper (Making Good on the Promise of ERM: A Standards and Best Practices Discussion Paper). The NCIP Standing Committee also completed a revision of the two-part standard, NISO Circulation Interchange (NCIP), version 2.02.

Three new projects were initiated in 2012. Following a request by 3MTM, their Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) is now being shepherded through the standardization process. A proposal from Michael Levine-Clark (University of Denver) on behalf of an informal DDA interest group resulted in a new group developing recommended practices for the Demand Driven Acquisition of Monographs. And a proposal from Lettie Conrad (SAGE Publications) initiated
a revision of the Journal Article Versions recommended practice to address an issue with the “Proof” definition. Several other potential projects are in the pipeline and expected to be approved and begin work in 2013.

NISO received a grant in late 2012 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop consensus around a community roadmap of needed activities related to the future of bibliographic information exchange. The grant will support both in-person and virtual meetings to engage a variety of stakeholders in defining the requirements and a roadmap for developing a new ecosystem of bibliographic data exchange. Our hope is that this project will identify gaps where current development efforts are not focused, that it will foster community conversations and understanding about pilot projects, and will help to ensure that a future bibliographic exchange environment is robust and interoperable.

Another proposal to the Mellon Foundation, submitted in late 2012 and awarded in early 2013, will support the encoding of a collection of template licenses for e-resources into the ONIX-PL format for deposit into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing, and library systems community.

NISO continued and expanded its ongoing educational programs in 2012 with 14 webinars, four joint webinars with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and three in-person forums. New in 2012 was an added benefit for NISO Library Standards Alliance (LSA) members of one free connection to each of the 14 NISO webinars. Since these connections are for site access, the LSA members could (and did) project the webinar to multiple users at their locations; the average site has about four attendees per event. This valuable educational benefit resulted in 50 new LSA members and more are joining to take advantage of this opportunity, which will continue to expand in 2013.

NISO, which is the U.S. administrator for the ISO Technical Committee on Information and Documentation (TC46) also acts as the Secretariat for the Subcommittee on Identification and Description (SC9). Among the 2012 accomplishments of SC9 were the publication of the International Standard Name Identifier and the Digital Object Identifier System standards. Part 2 of the international standard for Thesauri and Interoperability with Other Vocabularies was completed and approved in 2012 with publication occurring in March
of 2013. A number of U.S. members participated in the TC46 plenary meeting in Berlin in May 2012. NISO and ANSI have volunteered to host the TC46 meeting in the U.S. in 2014, with the support of the Library of Congress.

NISO moved its office in 2012 to a new and larger location that will provide room for expanded staff and improved meeting facilities. While the move was a big effort internally for the NISO staff, other than a new address the impact was fairly invisible to the outside world. Two new people joined the NISO staff in November 2012 at our new offices. Kathy Cassel replaced a departing Operations Manager and Juliana Wood was hired as NISO’s first Educational Programs Manager.

Thank you to everyone in the NISO community who was and is involved in our committees and working groups. Without you, none of these accomplishments would have been possible. If you are not yet involved in NISO activities, we encourage you to consider doing so. 2013 is already starting off as another busy year with many new projects to be undertaken in addition to those underway and our many standing and governance committees. We encourage you to find an opportunity to join others in the community in supporting and forwarding NISO’s work.