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Working Group Connection, September 2023: Projects via Information Policy & Analysis Topic Committee

Working Group Connection, September 2023: Projects via Information Policy & Analysis Topic Committee

September 2023

Co-chairs of the IPA topic committee are: Todd Digby (University of Florida) and Jessica Thibodeau (Copyright Clearance Center).

Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) Working Groups

Collections Development and Selection Working Group
Co-chairs: Eva Jurczyk (University of Toronto), Bill Maltarich (New York University)

Infrastructure Working Group
Co-chairs: Rob Cartolano (Columbia University Libraries), Kris Maloney (Big10 Academic Alliance (BTAA), Rutgers University)

Organizational Strategy and Governance Working Group
Co-chairs: Mike Gorrell (Index Data), Boaz Nadav-Manes (Lehigh University)
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
CCLP Project Web Site

CCLIP Working Groups, part of the IMLS-funded Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project, will develop a NISO Recommended Practice, based on an open standards architecture, that will support the flow of data about distinct library collections. The Recommended Practice will document exchange protocols that will describe gathering, normalizing, and exchanging holdings information, contractual information, retention obligations, and usage data. The CCLIP model will also include aggregation of library staff and subject matter expertise, local/consortial/group-based insights, and publisher/marketplace information necessary to support collaborative decisions at both the local and cross-institutional levels.

Initial planned CCLP applications based on these recommendations may include: A) An aggregated shared index and knowledge base in which libraries/publishers can share data about their collections and expertise; B) A discovery mechanism for library staff to support searching and browsing for content, information, and human resources; C) A communication application that will support interactions across institutions; D) Data aggregation, visualization, and reporting; E) Negotiation and group purchasing decision support protocols. The group will also review existing standards and protocols for the exchange of this information and, wherever possible, will adapt these extant best practices to this process, or recommend additional changes to those existing specifications.

The three initial CCLIP working groups have been hard at work over the past few months creating a foundation for the technical and social infrastructure needed to develop the CCLIP Recommended Practice. The Collections Development and Selection Working Group has been at work developing user personas and collaborating with a UX designer to develop interfaces to support various workstreams. The Infrastructure Working Group has been working on an outline of existing infrastructures and their implications for collaborative collections and various users. The Organizational Strategy and Governance Working Group has focused on the strengths and gaps of current collaborative programs with regard to budgetary issues, institutional buy-in, and overall management of collaborative collections with an eye towards the development of solutions.

The project is now moving towards its next phase and a call for participation for the second cohort of CCLIP working groups is now underway.

CCLP Co-PIs Todd Carpenter, Jill Morris, and Boaz Nadav-Manes gave a presentation about the initiative at ALA in June.  NISO will host a free webinar in late September to update the public on the project's progress. 

Content Platform Migrations Working Group

Working Group Web page 
Publication: RP-38-2021, Content Platform Migrations

NISO published this recommended practice in November 2021. This effort focused on improving communications between stakeholders when a publisher moves content from one hosting platform to another. The document lists the core concepts, approaches, and tasks to facilitate a successful migration with minimal disruption to the libraries and other vendors affected, as well as the publisher itself and the content platform vendors. Ultimately, end users enjoy the most benefit from stakeholder adoption of the principles outlined in the Recommended Practice, as their access to necessary content is unimpeded. 

The main document provides context, descriptions, and definitions. Each section concludes with recommendations related to each topic, with bulleted lists of example tasks for each stakeholder group. The recommendations are also provided as a Checklist in a spreadsheet, so they can be sorted, filtered, and customized. Both versions of the Recommendations identify the stakeholder that is likely to have responsibility for a given task.

A NISO Standing Committee will take over the work of promotion and support of the Recommended Practice. If you are interested in participating, please contact Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Executive Director.

Seamless Access

Project Website

NISO provides support and expertise to the Seamless Access project in the form of leadership on several working groups and membership on the governance committee of the project. Seamless Access is designed to enable a more streamlined access experience for federated authentication across scholarly and research information infrastructures, and works to make all of federated authentication a better experience for users. 

Since our last update in April, the Seamless Access project has continued to work with browser vendors and community working groups in the creation of new technology in response to upcoming major browser vendor changes. Members of the Seamless Access community are working with the broader technology community to find solutions specifically to the coming depreciation of third party cookies in browsers. 

This work is primarily taking place in a couple of external working groups;

While this work is vital to the future of authentication and authorization in the research community, Seamless Access has continued to onboard publishers and other authentication providers. It has also continued development along its public roadmap, making continued strides to improve the access experience to scholarly resources by users. 

 

SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) Standing Committee

SERU Standing Committee Web page
Publication: SERU Recommended Practice (NISO RP-7-2012)

The SERU Recommended Practice was updated in 2012 to be more flexible for use with online products beyond e-journals, and is supported by its Standing Committee who works to publicize SERU and educate libraries and publishers via direct contacts and public presentations at industry conferences.  The SERU website pages are available to help publishers and libraries understand and use the SERU material and NISO continues to add more libraries and publishers to the SERU Registry upon request. 

Transfer Standing Committee

Co-chairs: Sophia Anderton (BJU International), Linda Wobbe (SCELC) 
Transfer Standing Committee Web page 
Publication: Transfer Recommended Practice (NISO RP-24-2019)

The most recent version of the Transfer Code of Practice, Version 4 was published in 2019. Transfer helps publishers ensure that content remains accessible by readers and librarians when a journal or set of journals is transferred between parties, and supports a smooth process with minimal disruption. Publishers are asked to endorse the Code of Practice and to abide by its principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so. Supporting publishers are included in a list of endorsers on the Transfer website. The Transfer Alerting Service, sponsored by the ISSN Agency, facilitates communication about journal transfers and includes a database where details about transfers can be searched. 

The members of the Transfer Standing Committee, who meet bi-monthly, are responsible for encouraging publisher endorsement and planning outreach, education and training activities. These continue at industry conferences where members meet publishers in person and talk to them about Transfer directly.

Since last year, the Standing Committee has been immersed in discussions around the next version of Transfer, reviewing new use scenarios--such as those involving open access details, such as transformative agreements--and inspecting Transfer elements and procedures that may need to be updated in light of these industry development. New text continues to be developed and reviewed; a draft Transfer version 5 may be available early in 2024.  

Standing Committee member Regina Reynolds provided an update on Transfer at the NISO Update at ALA Annual in June. 

Z39.7 Data Dictionary Standing Committee

Co-chairs: Martha Kyrillidou (QualityMetrics), Joe Zucca (University of Pennsylvania)
Z39.7 Standing Committee

The purpose of ANSI/NISO Z39.7-2013 Information Services and Use: Metrics & Statistics for Libraries and Information Providers - Data Dictionary is to assist the information community by indicating and defining useful quantifiable information to measure the resources and performance of libraries and to provide a body of valid and comparable data on American libraries. It identifies standard definitions, methods, and practices relevant to library statistics activities in the United States. Any user of the online standard may submit suggested changes which are then reviewed by the Standing Committee during its conference calls.  As part of its work, the Standing Committee scans and reviews the statistical survey landscape and examines other assessment efforts--including use of particular vocabularies--in the community for effects on the Data Dictionary. 

Most recently, the Z39.7 Standing Committee has just finalized a new draft of the standard. It is expected that this updated draft will be made available to NISO Voting Members for their approval in the coming months and subsequently presented to ANSI for its approval prior to NISO publication. In the meantime, the Standing Committee has assembled resources for a separate appendix to the standard which will capture ongoing work (projects and tools) related to assessment and has been discussing recent meetings of interest and updates to various industry surveys.

New Project: Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM)

Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members

Many books, articles, videos, and other resources are often inaccessible or not sufficiently accessible to people with perceptual, cognitive, physical, or other disabilities. Schools, colleges, and universities are typically required by law to provide accessible versions of resources that students need. Similarly, government documents and other resources in the United States and elsewhere are required to be accessible. Unfortunately, most published resources are not yet provided by their publishers in fully accessible forms. This requires what is known as remediation: acquiring a publication in some available format and altering it to make it accessible, typically to a single individual needing a particular type of remediation. 

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project, "FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Education," was formed to eliminate redundant work and facilitate the sharing of remediated resources. As no standard metadata describing the process and results of remediation for accessibility in sufficient detail existed, the FRAME metadata model was developed to enable both discovery and deposit functions. 

The Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group will extend and refine the FRAME metadata model to meet the needs of the broader accessibility community, focused on individuals and organizations involved in the remediation of content for accessibility and the consumption of remediated content.  This work will include writing documentation that clearly defines and describes the properties in the model, the values they can use, and the relationships between them, and developing a schema that enables validation of content conformance to the model. 

Following the approval of the work item by NISO voting members, NISO staff and work item sponsors recently met to organize volunteer interest and outline the next steps of the working group's development following roster approval by the IPA topic committee. 

New Project: Open Access Workflows (OA Workflows)

Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members

The increasing adoption of OA policies and mandates has shifted strategy and business practices in libraries, scholarly publishing entities, and associated organizations. Meanwhile, the operationalization of financial transactions, compliance tracking with different policies, and related workflows has yet to be normalized. In the absence of established best practices there exists a sundry assortment of individualized solutions in libraries and publishers that rely heavily on publishers' workflows, systems, dashboards, invoices, and data. A number of organizations have defined local workflows to facilitate work but a shared recommendation would be of benefit to the entire community. 

The Open Access Workflows (OA Workflows) Working Group will develop a Recommended Practice on operationalizing OA business practices. As part of this effort the working group will conduct a landscape analysis on current OA business processes and take into consideration current gaps in the infrastructure and needed protocols for data exchange.

NISO staff are working to assemble the working group and organize meetings, following approval of the roster by the IPA topic committee. 

New Project: Unique Electronic Resource Package Identifiers

Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members

E-resources are frequently purchased as packages, which can range in size from a handful of titles to hundreds of thousands. Currently, these packages can only be identified by their name in the supply chain, within elements such as invoices, publisher websites, knowledge bases, etc. However, names are inherently ambiguous, so this causes problems that affect all stakeholders—libraries, content providers and platforms, knowledge base providers, and even users.

The NISO Unique Electronic Resource Package Identifiers Working Group will evaluate and create recommendations for a unique identifier to enable disambiguation between packages, which can be used across the supply chain. This identifier will allow all stakeholders to streamline and simplify their processes, and to more easily track changes. It will also provide libraries with clear information about which titles a package contains, enabling them, for example, to manage claims when journals move between publishers. 

NISO expects to convene the working group later this year.  For more information contact Nettie Lagace.

Abstract

Recent activity of the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project; Content Platform Migrations Working Group; SeamlessAccess; SERU; Transfer; and Z39.7.