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NISO Metasearch Standards Team Rolls Out Draft Standard and Best Practices Paper

Reports and Implementors' Guide Also Among Group's Newly Released Output

Bethesda, MD - November 1, 2005 - Following its Fall workshop on New Standards, Current Innovations, and Future Directions, the National Information Standards Organization's (NISO) Metasearch Initiative released new documents on technical solutions to the challenge of providing metasearch services. Participants in the Initiative focus their work in the areas of access management, collection description, and search and retrieval.
"A key driver in the Metasearch Initiative's scope of work and timeline is the strong case for library-based metasearch services," noted Pat Harris, NISO's Executive Director. "Research and scholarship require search services that cover licensed material, provide complete bibliographic citations, and exclude extraneous sources. These services are not available through popular search engines, even in the enhanced versions that have recently emerged."

"The Metasearch Initiative is devising technical solutions that content providers can use to improve capabilities in e-learning, for example," said NISO Board Chair, Carl Grant. "The challenges they faced were daunting and the output has been very impressive. It shows the value of NISO in creating a neutral forum where many needs and viewpoints can result in consensus and state-of-the-art results." Grant is President and COO of VTLS, Inc.

Metasearch Initiative co-Chair, Andrew Pace, emphasized the industry-wide importance of the documents: "Easy-to-understand draft standards and easy-to-implement best practices resulted from a consistently collaborative effort. With these documents, metasearch technology has a much better opportunity to move forward and benefit library users everywhere." Pace, a columnist for both American Libraries and Computers in Libraries, is Head of Systems at the North Carolina State University Libraries.

Providing a vendor perspective on the value of the new documents, Initiative co-Chair Jenny Walker explained: "This initiative has benefited from an international group of experts in their field; and the extent and quality of the draft standards and recommendations reflects this. But the initiative also achieved its objective to find practical and easy to implement standards. bepress (www.bepress.com) has already released a metasearch gateway that conforms to the NISO Metasearch Gateway (MXG) search and retrieve protocol specification, and this has already been configured -- with great ease -- in MetaLib, the Ex Libris metasearch tool." Walker is Vice-President Marketing and Business Development for the Information Services Division of Ex Libris (USA) Inc.

Consistent with all documents produced by NISO, the following are freely available for public use (http://www.niso.org/committees/MS_initiative.html) They are either final reports or the current implementation version of recommendations.

  • NISO Z39.91-2005, Collection Description Specification
    This draft standard defines a means of describing collections, where a collection is defined as an aggregation of items.
  • Ranking of Authentication and Access Methods Available to the Metasearch Environment
    This report provides an evaluation and ranking of existing authentication methods, as they could be used in a metasearch environment, and recommends metasearch-related authentication best practices in today's environment.
  • NISO Z39.92-2005, Information Retrieval Service Description Specification
    This standard defines a method of describing Information Retrieval oriented electronic services.
  • NISO Metasearch XML Gateway Implementors Guide
    This document describes the NISO Metasearch XML Gateway (MXG) protocol, which is based on the NISO-registered SRU protocol. This gateway provides a mechanism for information service providers to expose their content and services to a Metasearch engine.
  • Results Set Metadata
    Provided in both PDF and spreadsheet versions, this document defines a core set of metadata elements.
  • Citation Level Data Elements
    Provided in both PDF and spreadsheet versions, this document contains a minimum set of required citation level data elements that has been identified to overcome the current lack of standardization in the way a citation is formatted in a record returned by a metasearch engine.

About NISO

NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. NISO Standards, information about NISO's activities and membership are featured on the NISO website http://www.niso.org.

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