NISO at ALA

The American Library Association's Annual Conference, held June 23-27 in Orlando, FL, kept NISO's staff busy with presentations and other events. The following are details of some of NISO's programs at the show. ALA is just one of many events we attend, so keep an eye on future issues of Newsline and on our Twitter account, @NISOInfo, to find out about our plans for upcoming presentations, webinars, and more.

The annual forum hosted jointly by NISO and the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) took place on Friday, June 24, and featured several speakers from various arms of the publishing industry, and a lively question-and-answer session (see related slides). The speakers were introduced by NISO Executive Director Todd Carpenter, who, noting that this was the tenth anniversary of the event, looked back at the state of the industry ten years ago. In June 2006, he said, Kindle was a few days old, and iPhones had just been released. It was nine months since Tim Berners-Lee had coined the term semantic web and five years before ORCID was introduced. Carpenter introduced several speakers who addressed various aspects of how users experience books and publishing today.

BISG Executive Director Mark Kuyper noted that BISG is now celebrating its 40th anniversary. Years ago, he noted, the organization was heavily involved in the physical supply chain that brought books to stores and libraries. Now the focus, Kuyper said, is on bringing key members of the industry together. An important movement that involves all of these players is the trend toward materials being "born accessible" to people with disabilities, and Kuyper introduced a related resource: the BISG Quick Start Guide to Accessible Publishing. The document is itself accessible, he noted, and is available in PDF and EPUB versions.

Andrew Albanese, Senior Writer and Features Editor at Publishers Weekly (PW), spoke largely about the issues that still surround the availability of e-books in libraries. He introduced a survey conducted by BISG and ALA, and a PW poll; these show that while libraries are the first source that comes to mind when readers look to acquire a book, only 23 percent of respondents had borrowed an e-book from a public library. One cause of related fatigue, Albanese said, is that everything except e-books is becoming cheaper on phones and other digital devices. Long hold times and pricing are also issues, he said, noting that these days patrons are used to services such as Netflix that provide material instantly.

NISO Patron Privacy Initiative
NISO's recent patron privacy work then took center stage, with presentations by the organization's Associate Director for Programs, Nettie Lagace; Daniel Ayala, Director of Information Security, ProQuest; and Michael Robinson, Head of Library Systems, University of Alaska at Anchorage.

Lagace introduced the concept of NISO as a Switzerland: a neutral forum for parties that may not wish to speak to each other directly. In that capacity, and using the American Library Association's code of ethics as a backdrop, NISO worked over most of 2015 to clarify actions libraries can take to protect patron privacy, given that libraries now routinely facilitate patron interaction with third-party vendors. The impetus for the work, said Lagace, was the Adobe DRM case in which user information was being passed unencrypted over the Internet. NISO decided to become involved and received a related grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the product of which was the NISO Consensus Principles on Users' Digital Privacy in Library, Publisher, and Software Provider Systems. NISO's next task, said Lagace, is to figure out how to build guidelines that grow from this consensus and tie into the user experience.

Daniel Ayala, who described himself as "a privacy person first," explained that key in privacy work is the balance between privacy, security, and easy use. There are competing mandates on these issues from different constituencies. It's also important to note, he said, that privacy and confidentiality are not necessarily the same thing; data may legitimately be collected, meaning that some privacy has been sacrificed, but use of that data can still keep patrons' personal data confidential.

Michael Robinson was a member of the core working group that produced NISO's privacy principles, and he noted that the many meetings that produced the document were surprising: he expected a vendor/librarian dichotomy, but the most heated discussions were among camps of librarians. We have a legal obligation to protect reader privacy, Robinson noted, but librarians need to embrace the web as well as create a quality user experience and gather and use metrics. He presented related false dichotomies, including: privacy is dead vs. privacy at all costs and abandoning our ethics vs. fettering competitiveness. Robinson espouses a third way: putting the user in the center of the equation, by letting them know what the choices are and how they can choose among them.

Engaging the user
Moderated by NISO Executive Director Todd Carpenter, this portion of the program was a discussion of various issues by Therese Hunt, Vice President of Marketing, Elsevier; Lettie Conrad, Executive Program Manager, Discovery & Access at SAGE Publications; and Becky Brasington Clark, head of the Library of Congress's Publishing Office, with the speakers therefore bringing vendor and not-for-profit publisher viewpoints to the table.

Several topics were discussed, among them how to introduce serendipity into search functionalities that have been too focused on known-item queries. Conrad, who mentioned a recent SAGE white paper on serendipity, reminded the audience that users have e-commerce driven expectations, and at issue is how much we need to either mirror those or explore the idea that context changes when on an academic site. Elsevier includes serendipity in its work, said Hunt, by "introducing you to your tribe." Searching is now moving "away from the fire-hose," she said, and toward facilitating researchers' use of their personal network. Clark, meanwhile, claimed that, "You make your own serendipity as a publisher...Put all the pieces in place for it to happen and the user will experience apparent serendipity."