Another announcement by Cindy Hepfer, ALA Voting representative to NISO (and recent recipient of the Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award!) has arrived. This announcement builds on earlier efforts to establish voting pools for standards requiring reaffirmation, forwarded by the NISO Content and Collection Management Topic Committee. This group has been assigned the name of Group 4.
The text associated with this announcement is as follows:
“In accordance with NISO procedures, we are offering you the option of joining the voting pool for five NISO standards that are due for reviews. All five standards are under the responsibility of the Content and Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee.
…
Joining the voting pool will allow you to vote on the standard and provide comments. Once the voting pools have been formed, separate ballots for each standard will be issued only to those who have joined the pool. If you do not join the voting pool for a particular standard, you are in essence “abstaining” from any decision made regarding this standard’s reaffirmation ballot.â€
NISO needs at least 15% of the voting membership to join the pool. If less than 15% express interest in the standards, they may be considered by the Board for administrative withdrawal.
The five standards in this voting pool (with the URL to the PDF files for the standard) are listed below:
1) ANSI/NISO Z39.53-2001, Codes for the Representation of Languages for Information Interchange
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-53-2001/
2) ANSI/NISO Z39.64-1989 (R2002), East Asian Character Code for Bibliographic Use Bibliographic Use
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-64-1989R2002/
3) ANSI/NISO Z39.77-2000, Guidelines for Information About Preservation Products
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-77-2001/
4) ANSI/NISO Z39.79-2001, Environmental Conditions for Exhibiting Library and Archival Materials
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-79-2001/
5) ANSI/NISO Z39.82-2001, Title Pages for Conference Publications
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-82-2001/
Cindy adds: “The ballot to select which voting pools ALA should opt into closes April 15. I therefore would like to have feedback from anyone who wishes to comment no later than April 8. Since these are NISO and not ISO standards, you can review the documents in question yourself (without me having to send you copies) at the URLs listed above. Unless I am presented a compelling case not to opt ALA into these voting pools, I plan to opt the organization into the review process for all of these standards, none of which are outside the range of library expertise.â€
Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator