KBART Featured in November's Open Teleconference
KBART recommends best practices for the communication of electronic resource title list and coverage data from content providers to knowledge base (KB) developers. KBART specifies file format, delivery mechanisms, and fields to include, and it applies to both serials and monographs. More information on the work, including the 2014 Recommended Practice, can be found at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/kbart.
KBART Standing Committee co-chair Andrée Rathemacher, Head of Acquisitions at the University of Rhode Island, and member Sheri Meares, Senior Director, KnowledgeBase at EBSCO were part of this call in order to discuss the initiative and how the Standing Committee is managing its work, including tackling a "KBART Phase III" development process.
KBART provides all parties in the information supply chain with straightforward guidance about metadata formatting-focused mainly on journal resources-to ensure the exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers. The KBART Recommendations were first published in 2010 and updated in 2014. In the meantime, the products that use KB data have changed dramatically. KBs now, in addition to link resolution, also provide the foundation for electronic resource management systems (ERMs), are used in conjunction with COUNTER data, provide rights/holdings information to discovery systems, provide data to library catalogs, and other uses. The KBART Automation Recommended Practice was published in 2019, providing a means to transfer accurate, library-specific KBART-formatted holdings reports between content providers’ access control systems and knowledge bases, allowing knowledge base-powered systems to more accurately reflect content accessible at a particular institution and its unique holdings.
Since the first Recommended Practice was issued, scores of publishers and content providers have endorsed KBART and demonstrated their commitment to good quality metadata provision. With implementation of the KBART recommendations, users can be assured that the providers' metadata is trusted and has the required level of granularity without the burdensome task of title-by-title checking.