Tag: National Information Standards Organization

NASIG 2012: Everyone’s a Player — Creation of Standards in a Fast-Paced Shared World

Speaker: Nettie Lagace, NISO – National Information Standards Organization

NISO is responsible for a lot of the things we work with all the time, by making the systems work more seamlessly and getting everyone on the same page. More than you may think. They operate on a staff of five: one who is the public face and cheerleader, one who travels to anywhere needed, one who makes sure that the documents are properly edited, and two who handle the technical aspects of the organization/site/commitees/etc.

Topic committees identify needs that become the working groups that tackle the details. Where there is an issue, there’s a working group, with many people involved in each.

New NISO work items consider:
What is not working and how it impacts stakeholders.
How it relates to existing efforts.
Beneficiaries of the deliverables and how.
Stakeholders.
Scope of the initiative.
Encouragement for implementation.

Librarians aren’t competitive in the ways that other industries might be, so this kind of work is more natural for them. The makeup of the working group tries to keep a balance so that no single interest category makes up the majority of the membership. Consensus is a must. They are also trying to make the open process aspect be more visible/accessible to the general public.

Speaker: Marshall Breeding

Library search has evolved quite a bit, from catalog searches that essentially replicated the card catalog process to federated searching to discovery interfaces to consolidated indexes. Libraries are increasingly moving towards these consolidated indexes to cover all aspects of their collections.

There is a need to bring some order to the market chaos this has created. Discovery brings value to library collections, but it brings some uncertainty to publishers. More importantly, uneven participation diminishes the impact, and right now the ecosystem is dominated by private agreements.

What is the right level of investment in tools that provide access to the millions of dollars of content libraries purchase every year? To be effective, these tools need to be comprehensive, so what do we need to do to encourage all of the players to participate and make the playing field fair to all. How do libraries figure out which discovery service is best for them?

The NISO Open Discovery Initiative hopes to bring some order to that chaos, and they plan to have a final draft by May 2013.

Speaker: Regina Reynolds, Library of Congress

From the beginning, ejournals have had many pain points. What brought this to a head was the problem with missing previous titles in online collections. Getting from a citation to the content doesn’t work when the name is different.

There were issues with missing or incorrect numbering, publishing statements, and dates. And then there are the publishers that used print ISSN for the electronic version. As publishers began digitizing back content, these issues grew exponentially. Guidelines were needed.

After many, many conversations, The Presentation & Identification of E-Journals (PIE-J) was produced and is available for comment until July 5th. The most important part is the three pages of recommended practices.

See also: In Search of Best Practices for Presentation of E-Journals by Regina Romano Reynolds and Cindy Hepfer

ER&L 2012: Working For You — NISO Standards and Best Practices

wood, water, and stone
courtyard of the conference hotel

Speaker: Nettie Legace

NISO is more than just the people at the office — it’s the community that comes together to address the problems that we have, and they’re alway soliciting new work items. What are your pain points? Who needs to be involved? How does it relate to existing efforts?

A NISO standard is more formal and goes through a rigorous process to be adopted. A NISO recommended practice is more edgy and discretionary. There are a lot of standards and best practices that have not been adopted, and it depends on the feasibility of implementation.

Get involved if you care about standards and best practices!

Speakers: Jamene Brooks-Kieffer & John Law

They’re talking about the Open Discovery Initiative. Discovery systems have exploded, and there are now opportunities to come together to create some efficiencies through standards. The working group includes librarians, publishers, and discovery service providers.

The project has three main goals: identify stakeholder needs & requirements, create recommendations and tools to streamline process, and provide effective means of assessment. Deliverables include a standard vocabulary, which the group has found they need just to communicate, and a NISO recommended practice. They plan to have the initial draft by January 2013 and finish the final draft by May 2013.

There will be an open teleconference on Monday.

Speaker: Oliver Pesch

SUSHI was one of the first standards initiatives to use the more agile development process which allows for review and revision in 5-7 years. The down side to a fixed standard is that you have to think of every possible outcome in the standard because you may not get a chance to address it again, and with electronic standards, you have to be able to move quickly. So, they focused on the core problem and allowed the standard to evolve through ongoing maintenance.

SUSHI support is now a requirement for COUNTER compliance, and it has been adopted by approximately 40 content providers. MISO client is a free tool you can download and use it to harvest SUSHI reports.

Part of SUSHI’s success comes from being a part of NISO and the integration with COUNTER, but they’re not done. They’re doing a lot of work to promote interoperability, and they have published the SUSHI Server Test Mode recommended practice. They’re also preparing for release 4 of COUNTER, and making adjustments as needed. They’re also publishing a COUNTER SUSHI Implementation Profile to standardize the interpretation of implementation across providers.

Questions/Comments:
Major concern about content providers who also have web-scale discovery solutions that don’t share content with each other — will that ever change? Not in the scope of the work of the ODI. More about how players work together in better ways, not about whether or not content providers participate.

Why is SUSHI not more commonly available? Some really big players aren’t there yet. How fast is this going to happen? A lot of work is in development but not live yet. What drives development is us. [Except we keep asking for it, and nothing happens.] If you allow it to be okay for it to not be there, then it won’t.

JISC created a template letter for member libraries to send to publishers, and that is making a difference.

NASIG 2009: Moving Mountains of Cost Data

Standards for ILS to ERMS to Vendors and Back

Presenter: Dani Roach

Acronyms you need to know for this presentation: National Information Standards Organization (NISO), Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE), and Draft Standard For Trial Use (DSFTU).

CORE was started by Ed Riding from SirsiDynix, Jeff Aipperspach from Serials Solutions, and Ted Koppel from Ex Libris (and now Auto-Graphics). The saw a need to be able to transfer acquisitions data between systems, so they began working on it. After talking with various related parties, they approached NISO in 2008. Once they realized the scope, it went from being just an ILS to ERMS transfer to also including data from your vendors, agents, consortia, etc, but without duplicating existing standards.

Library input is critical in defining the use cases and the data exchange scenarios. There was also a need for a data dictionary and XML schema in order to make sure everyone involved understood each other. The end result is the NISO CORE DSFTU Z39.95-200x.

CORE could be awesome, but in the mean time, we need a solution. Roach has a few suggestions for what we can do.

Your ILS has a pile of data fields. Your ERMS has a pile of data fields. They don’t exactly overlap. Roach focused on only eight of the elements: title, match point (code), record order number, vendor, fund, what paid for, amount paid, and something else she can’t remember right now.

She developed Access tables with output from her ILS and templates from her ERMS. She then ran a query to match them up and then upload the acquisitions data to her ERMS.

For the database record match, she chose the Serials Solutions three letter database code, which was then put into an unused variable MARC field. For the journals, she used the SSID from the MARC records Serials Solutions supplies to them.

Things that you need to decide in advance: How do you handle multiple payments in a single fiscal year (What are you doing currently? Do you need to continue doing it?)? What about resources that share costs? How will you handle one-time vs. ongoing purchase? How will you maintain the integrity of the match point you’ve chosen?

The main thing to keep in mind is that you need to document your decisions and processes, particularly for when systems change and CORE or some other standard becomes a reality.

NASIG 2008: Using Institutional and Library Identifiers to Ensure Access to Electronic Resources

Presenters: Helen Henderson, Don Hamparian, and John Shaw

One of the perpetual problems with online access to journals is that often, something breaks down on the supply chain, and the library discovers that access has disappeared. The presenters seek to offer ideas for preventing this from happening.

Henderson showed a list of 15 transactions that take place in acquiring and maintaining a subscription to a single title. There are plenty of places for a breakdown. Name changes, agent changes, publisher changes, hosting platform changes, price changes, bundle changes, licensing changes, authentication changes, etc.

OCLC’s WorldCat Registry maintains institutional information for libraries, which is populated and augmented by libraries and partners. Libraries can use it to register their OpenURL resolvers, IP addresses, and to share the profile with selected organizations. OCLC uses it to configure WorldCat Local, among other things. Vendors use it as an OpenURL gateway service and to verify customer data.

Ringgold’s Identify database and services normalizes institutional information for publishers. It includes consortia membership information and the Anglicized name, as well as many of the data elements in OCLC’s registry. Rather than OCLC symbol, they have an identifying number for each institution.

Potential interactions between the two identifiers includes a maping between them. The two directories do not have as much overlapping information as you might think.

Standards and identifiers are becoming even more important to the supply chain with the transition to electronic publication. Publishers need clean records in order to provide holdings lists to libraries and OpenURL resolvers, among other things. Publishers use services like WorldCat Registry and Identify to improve their data, service, and cost-savings that gets passed on to subscribers.

ICEDIS is a standard for the exchange of data between publishers and agents. It is old and has been implemented differently. They are hoping to develop an XML version by 2010, which will include the institutional identifier. ONIX is working on developing automatic holdings reports that will be fed into ERMS.

Project TRANSFER will create a way to exchange subscription information using a unique identifier. KBART is another initiative looking at a portion of the solution. I² (part of NISO) is looking at standardizing metadata using identifiers, beyond just for library resources. CORE is a project in the vendor community working on communicating between the ILS and the ERMS.

Standards will help ease the pain of price agreement between publishers and agents, customer identification, consortia membership and entitlements, and many of the other things that cause the supply chain to break down.

Libraries should include their identifier numbers in orders. The subscription agents are too overwhelmed to implement the kind of change that would require them to look up and add this to every record. Ringgold & OCLC are in communication with NISO to create a standard that is not proprietary.

NASIG 2008: KBart – Best Practices in Knowledge Base Data Transfer

Presenter: Peter McCracken

Librarians understand what OpenURL is and what it does, but not all publishers understand it that well. One of the main problems with OpenURL is making sure that the links work and take users to the content, not to mention making sure that all the links are there which should be.

One thing that libraries often miss is that their link resolvers should include information about their print holdings as well as the electronic ones. [Side note: The non-portability of data from our ILS as noted by Breeding earlier today is part of why that is the case — it’s often more work than we have time for to accurately pull our print holdings data into our link resolvers.]

In order to make the OpenURL process work, content providers need to do most of the work, which includes generating the correct links from sources and sharing the correct information about targets. The library’s responsibility is to ensure that the coverage and content in the knowledge base reflects the license agreement.

The core of the problems we face is metadata. Data provided by publishers, libraries, and vendors all can potentially be broken or incorrect. In a perfect world, all of the metadata would be perfect, but it’s not.

Glen Wiley & the folks at Cornell are doing something about fixing OpenURL syntax errors. Part of the problem with these errors comes from publishers not knowing or understanding what users will be doing with OpenURLs. And, there is often no way to provide feedback to publishers.

Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) is a UKSG and NISO collaborative project working to provide better data for everyone as well as ensuring the timely transfer of accurate data to ERMS and link resolvers. The core working group meets monthly and includes link resolver/ERMS suppliers, publishers, subscription agents, aggregators, libraries, and consortia. Several groups, including NASIG, are monitoring the process.

KBart seeks to provide best practice guidelines, educational opportunities, and the creation of an information hub for all players. The group has looked at the problems facing the supply chain, developed an initial list of terms that need to be clarified and defined, and started to build a report based around the problems and a supply chain flowchart. They’ve now broken into subgroups to address specific parts and the most relevant bits for each group.

The plan is to finish by this time next year and will present at UKSG, and hopefully NASIG as well. They might go on to create a standard, but will need to determine if it’s appropriate at that time.

Phase II will be focusing on non-textual content. Digital collection managers rejoice!

OpenURL syntax errors potentially can be easily fixed across the board, but a greater challenge is to evaluate and improve the accuracy of the data.

OpenURL

One of my big projects at work has been getting our SFX database set up. For those unfamiliar with the name, SFX is an OpenURL link resolver that connects (among other things) citations with content. My department head sent me a press release a couple of weeks ago about NISO releasing a trial standard for … Continue reading “OpenURL”

One of my big projects at work has been getting our SFX database set up. For those unfamiliar with the name, SFX is an OpenURL link resolver that connects (among other things) citations with content. My department head sent me a press release a couple of weeks ago about NISO releasing a trial standard for OpenURL. I have not attempted to understand all of the technical verbage used in the documents, but I am excited that the world of electronic resources is moving towards creating standards that will allow different resources to talk to each other.

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