LITA Blog

Some new standards news is available from Cindy Hepfer, ALA Voting Representative to NISO. She reports that the ‘Digital Talking Book Standard Revision Project Approval’ ballot is now available, to approve the initiation of a revision of ANSI/NISO Z39.86, Specifications for the Digital Talking Book. The revision proposal submitted by the standard’s maintenance agency, the DAISY Consortium, has been reviewed and approved by NISO’s Content and Collection Management Topic Committee.

Because the documents themselves are not available to the public from the new NISO website, those who wish to see the the revision proposal and a business case document should contact Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (verifying your ALA membership) and she’ll send it to you. Cindy points out that if ALA votes “Yes” on this ballot, ALA will be automatically placed into the voting pool for the subsequent revision that is produced (assuming that the project is approved). In the absence of negative input from ALA members, Cindy will vote YES on the revision proposal and get the organization into the voting pool. Her deadline for comments is August 22.

In addition, NISO’s announcement to voting members indicated that an informational e-mail interest group list will be created for those who wish to follow the project’s work. Those interested in monitoring this activity (again, assuming it is approved), should contact Cindy, who will pass them along to NISO when she votes.

I found the last point about the interest group list notable–I suspect we may see more of this as an outgrowth of the new capabilities NISO is trying to build around their new site and its capabilities.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Standards Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.