When publishers change content hosting platforms, their migrations are complicated projects which involve many varied stakeholders and organizations. A successful platform migration will minimize any disruption in a user's ability to access and retrieve published content during and after the migration process.
The NISO Content Platform Migrations Working Group, made up of affected stakeholders, has applied itself for the last year-plus to examining these processes and interactions between stakeholders in order to develop guidelines for the industry to consider and incorporate into their planning and execution of content migration tasks. The NISO Content Platform Migrations Recommended Practice will describe a baseline level of quality and performance, detailing responsibilities for publishers, platform vendors, and librarians in the areas of access to content and migration of content and its metadata, user and administration accounts, usage statistics, and general communication.
The draft Recommended Practice is almost ready to be made available for a public comment period; we expect this to be opened in the coming weeks. Working Group co-chairs Athena Hoeppner of the University of Central Florida and Kim Steinle of Duke University Press discuss their journey in this initiative with NISO Associate Executive Director Nettie Lagace.
