Standards Watch

Last Standards Announcements of 2009?

Some end-of-year announcements by Cindy Hepfer, ALA Voting Representative to NISO, give us some potential ideas for what to do over the long holidays, should all that free time make us antsy.

1. ISO/FDIS 690, Information and documentation — Guidelines for bibliographic references and citations to information resources, ballot for final draft standard.

“This International Standard gives guidelines for the preparation of bibliographic references. It is applicable to bibliographic references and citations to all kinds of information resources, including but not limited to monographs, serials, contributions, patents, cartographic materials, electronic information resources (including computer software and databases), music, recorded sound, prints, photographs, graphic and audiovisual works, and moving images. It is not applicable to machine-parsable citations. It is also not applicable to legal citations, which have their own standards. This will be the third edition of the standard merging and revising ISO 690:1987 and ISO 690-2:1997.”

Also noted: “There were quite a few edits made between the previous draft and this one to address comments and particularly for consistency (especially in examples). Most of these were editorial, rather than substantive in nature. A link provided in the ballot references the final voting report for the previous draft, which includes a response to all of the comments. When voting and commenting keep in mind that at this final stage a “Yes” vote can only have editorial, non-substantive comments. If a sufficient number of Yes votes are obtained, the standard will proceed to publication.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Tuesday Jan. 12, 2010.

2. ISO/DIS 24616, Linguistic resources management — Multilingual information framework, liaison ballot.

“This standard describes a metamodel and data categories for a Multilingual information framework (MLIF) that provides a generic platform for modeling and managing multilingual information in various domains: localization, translation, multimedia, document management, digital library, and information or business modeling applications. MLIF provides a metamodel and a set of generic data categories for various application domains. MLIF also provides strategies for the interoperability and/or linking of models including, but not limited to: XLIFF, TMX, SMILText and ITS.”

This is a ballot for a standard developed by the ISO subcommittee on language resource management (TC37/SC4). As a liaison to this committee, we can only recommend a vote and supply comments. The US vote on this standard will be submitted by ASTM International, the U.S. administrator for this committee.

Deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Mar. 31, 2010.

3. The third announced item is a bit more complicated, and concerns the AFNOR Appeal of ISO/DIS 26324, Digital object identifier system.

This ballot is to obtain a US position on the question:
“Do you support the AFNOR appeal [for ISO/DIS 26324, Digital object identifier system] based on the information provided in document ISO/TC 46 N2232?” [Note: AFNOR is the French standards body — equivalent to ANSI in the U.S.]

NISO is recommending a NO vote on this ballot. Todd Carpenter, Director of NISO, has announced the following:

“To help educate the community–both nationally and internationally–, NISO will be hosting an open teleconference on January 6th at 10:00 am EST with Norman Paskin (International DOI Foundation) and Brian Green (International ISBN Agency) to discuss the working group’s activities and the potential benefits to using the DOI in conjunction with other SC 9 identifiers.”

Cindy notes: “I have not yet received information from Todd about the open teleconference on Jan. 6, but such events are generally listed on NISO’s events page.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Jan. 6, 2010.

The standard in question, ISO/DIS 26324, is currently at ballot and can be accessed directly at this URL: http://www.niso.org/apps/org/workgroup/tc46ballots/ballot.php?id=139

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote NO on this appeal.

On behalf of ALA, Cindy will be providing feedback to NISO as to whether ALA believes that NISO should approve or disapprove the ballots or questions at issue. NISO staff will review and consider our feedback along with that received from numerous other voting members.

ALA members who wish to see a copy of the documents noted above for the purpose of offering comments prior to the deadline should contact Cindy directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. (If possible, copy me on requests as well — metadata.maven@gmail.com). Please be sure to let Cindy know that you ARE a current ALA member – she cannot send you a document without this assurance. Keep in mind that the holidays may delay responses, and be sure and make you requests for documents well before the deadlines.

Best wishes to all this holiday season!

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator