Working Group Connection, May 2025: Projects via Information Policy & Analysis Topic Committee
Co-chairs of the IPA topic committee are: Jennifer D’Urso (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Jessica Thibodeau (Copyright Clearance Center).
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM)
Co-chairs: Bill Kasdorf (Kasdorf and Associates, LLC.), J. Stephen Downie (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jacob Jett (Association of State Floodplain Managers)
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Webpage
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.
As part of the information gathering phase, the working group split into a series of six subgroups to discuss the application of the metadata model and assess needs in the areas of Resource Sharing, Non-print Disabilities, Higher Education, Primary/Secondary Education, Non-Text Media, and Internationalization. As of December 2024, the subgroups have completed their work. A separate subgroup was developed to address the technical needs required to develop the additional schema that will comprise the standard. The subgroup is currently meeting through July, after which the group plans to begin drafting the standard.
Co-chair Bill Kasdorf also presented an update on the group's activities during the Working Group Update 2 session at the NISO Plus conference in February.
Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) Working Groups
Acquisitions Working Group
Co-Chairs: Jesse Koennecke (Cornell University), Russell Michalak (Goldey-Beacom College)
Assessment/Data Analysis Working Group
Co-Chairs: Anne Larrivee (West Chester University of Pennsylvania), Jharina Pascual (University of California, Irvine)
Cataloging/Metadata Working Group
Co-Chairs: Gaëlle Bequet (ISSN International Centre), Jeanette Norris (Yale University)
Collections Development and Selection Working Group
Co-chairs: Eva Jurczyk (University of Toronto), Bill Maltarich (New York University)
Consortia Working Group
Co-Chairs: Robin Hastings (Northeast Kansas Library System (NEKLS), Boaz Nadav-Manes (Lehigh 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 final CCLIP working group, the Consortia Working Group, completed work in April. Members of other working groups are currently reviewing the working group's contribution to the draft of the CCLIP Recommended Practice. Once this review is complete, an editorial group will be formed, comprising members from across the seven CCLIP working groups, to review and refine the document prior to its public comment period.
Project Co-PIs Todd Carpenter and Boaz Nadav-Manes, along with Cataloging/Metadata Working Group co-chair Gaelle Bequet, presented an update on the project at the Charleston Conference in November 2024. Project Co-PI Todd Carpenter presented an update on the project’s current progress and next steps at NISO Plus in February, and will host a session providing a community update at ALA Annual 2025.
Open Access Business Processes (OABP)
Co-chairs: Yvonne Campfens (OA Switchboard), Amanda Holmes (CRKN)
OABP Working Group Web page
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 Business Processes (OABP) Working Group began meeting late in 2023 and is developing a Recommended Practice on operationalizing OA business practices.
Work in various subgroups continued through March 2025, and the full group is now working to incorporate all parts into a cohesive recommendation.
Public presentations about OABP will include the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting at the end of May. An update on OABP’s work was included in the Working Group Update session at NISO Plus in Baltimore in February.
Seamless Access
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. SeamlessAccess 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, the proposed deprecation of third party cookies has been revised for one of the major browser vendors. While that seems positive news for the SeamlessAccess service, the group is still analysing the precise implications of this change and will update the community as soon as possible via the SeamlessAccess email list and website. Until then, it is recommended to pause efforts to test SeamlessAccess’ Storage Access API implementation.
The project is still busy working on the development of an Access Audit Toolkit, designed to help organizations determine how robust their authentication and authorization systems are in a selection of specific areas, and discovery response, pinning, and branding. IdP filtering, allowing integrators to show a selection of organizations to their users, has been released. Along with this work, there is ongoing work to simplify and clarify the SeamlessAccess.org website.
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), Emilie Lavallée-Funston (University of Stirling)
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 subgroup 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.
In March, the draft Recommended Practice of Version 5 of the Transfer Code of Practice was made available for public comment. The public comment period ended in early May, but comments and the draft can still be accessed on the group's website. The working group is currently evaluating the feedback received to determine how it can be incorporated into the draft.
U.S. National PID Strategy
Co-chairs: John Chodacki (California Digital Library (CDL), Rachael Kotarski (University of Chicago Library)
U.S. National PID Strategy Working Group Webpage
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
Persistent identifiers, or PIDs, are a critical part of the infrastructure supporting scholarly communications and open research. They support research discovery and citations, allow users and systems to easily identify authors and institutions and link them to research outputs, and help ensure compliance with a growing number of government and funder mandates advancing open scholarship. To date, however, approaches to encouraging the adoption of PIDs and investment in PID infrastructure have not been coordinated, and there is little guidance available on how best to improve the implementation and efficacy of PIDs within the diverse spheres of the US research landscape. The Open Research Funders Group, building on work first begun by the Research Data Alliance, released a report, “Developing a US National PID Strategy,” in the spring of 2024. The report highlighted the need for a strategy that would build support for PIDs, increase their adoption, and help stakeholders to incorporate them into workflows and systems more easily. The NISO U.S. National PID Strategy Working Group will further expand on the work defined by the ORFG PID Strategy Working Group to create a standard advancing PIDs and open scholarship.
Following approval of the work item in August 2024 by NISO Voting Members to develop an ANSI/NISO standard for a United States national PID strategy, the U.S. National PID Strategy Working Group began in November 2024. After the group's work plan received approval in May, two subgroups are currently underway to develop sections of the standard that focus on the normative aspects and the audience/scope sections.
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.
The Z39.7 Standing Committee has 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.