1. ISO/DIS 30300, Information and documentation–Management system for records–Fundamentals and vocabulary.

“This International Standard establishes the objectives for using a Management System for Records (MSR), provides principles for an MSR, describes a process approach and specifies roles for top management. It also defines terms and definitions applicable to the ISO 30300 series of International Standards.”

2. ISO/DIS 30301, Information and documentation — Management system for records — Requirements

“This Standard specifies requirements for a Management Systems for Records (MSR) to support an organization in the achievement of its mandate, mission, strategy and goals through the development and implementation of a records policy and objectives and the measurement and monitoring of performance.”

If these standards receive 100% approval from the international voting members of the ISO committee TC46/SC11, they can go directly to publication. This level of a draft standard is usually the last stage at which substantive comments will get addressed.

As is usual with ISO standards, the documents are not available openly but must be requested through Cindy. Your request, sent to HSLcindy@buffalo.edu, must include a statement that you are an ALA member. Please also copy your request to me at metadata.maven@gmail.com, so that I can track LITA interest.

Deadline for comments concerning both ballots are due to Cindy by Thursday, Sept. 30, 2010.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. TC46/SC9 New Work Item Proposal Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies – Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies.

“This ballot is to approve a new work item for Part 2 of ISO 25964, which will deal with thesauri and other types of vocabulary that are commonly used for information retrieval. Part 1 of ISO 25964 is a merger and revision of two existing ISO standards — ISO 2788, Documentation — Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri, and ISO 5964, Documentation — Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri. The whole of Part 2 will cover new ground not previously covered in any international standard. A working draft of Part 2 is included with the proposal. It is proposed that the same working group currently developing Part 1 will also develop Part 2. (They are the developers of the working draft.) … This part of ISO 25964 deals with thesauri and other types of vocabulary that are commonly used for information retrieval. It describes, compares and contrasts the elements and features of these vocabularies that are implicated when interoperability is needed. It gives recommendations for the establishment and maintenance of mappings between multiple thesauri, or between thesauri and other types of vocabularies.”

From Cindy: “The U.S. representative on that working group is Marcia Zeng. If anyone would like to nominate someone else to also work on the project, please include the name and contact information in your comments.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is Friday, July 9, 2010.

2. New project to revise ISO 11620:2008, Information and documentation-Library performance indicators.

“This ballot is to approve a new project to revise ISO 11620:2008 … the revision is proposed due to recent updates in related standards, both nationally and internationally, and to address new developments in digital library services.”

From Cindy. “If we vote to approve this standard, we need to identify a U.S. expert for the working group. If anyone would like to participate on this project or nominate someone else to participate, please include the name and contact information in your comments.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is Friday, Aug. 6, 2010.

3. A new project to develop a new TC46/SC8 standard on Methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries.

“The proposed standard is intended to complement the existing set of standards for statistics and quality measures in libraries and information services. The intent is to define and describe methods for assessing and measuring the impact of libraries and library services. Though the methodology for assessing impact will be the main issue, a selection of tested “impact indicators” for specified services shall be added.”

From Cindy: “If we vote to approve this standard, we need to identify a U.S. expert for the working group. If anyone would like to participate on this project or nominate someone else to participate, please include the name and contact information in your comments.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is Friday, Aug. 6, 2010.

As is usual with ISO standards, the documents are not available openly but must be requested through Cindy. Your request, sent to HSLcindy@buffalo.edu, must include a statement that you are an ALA member. Please also copy your request to me at metadata.maven@gmail.com, so that I can track LITA interest.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. ISO/DIS 27730, Information and documentation — International standard collection identifier (ISCI)

“This International Standard establishes the specifications for the International Standard Collection Identifier (ISCI) as a unique international identification system for each collection, fond and (archival) series, and part(s) of collections, fonds and series. This International Standard establishes the specifications for the structure of an identifier and promotes the use of the identifier with regard to identifying systems that already exist. It also gives a list of recommended metadata elements that describe a collection. If this standard receives 100% approval from the international voting members of the ISO committee TC46/SC9, it can go directly to publication. This level of a draft standard is usually the last stage at which substantive comments will get addressed.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is Monday, Sept. 20, 2010.

2. Liaison ballot for New Work Item proposal for Language resources management – Segmentation Rules eXchange (SRX)

“This ballot is for a new work item proposal to develop a standard on Language resources management. Segmentation Rules eXchange (SRX) defines an XML formalism for describing how language-processing tools segment text (e.g., into sentences or paragraphs) based on a series of sequentially applied pattern (regular expression)-based rules. In addition to enhancing interoperability between tools such as computer-aided translation, SRX would also allow the definition of standard language- or country-specific rules.” NISO Note: Although not explicitly called out in the proposal, this standard could potentially be useful in Knowledge Organization Systems (classification, thesaurus, ontology) work, for example, interoperability between multilingual thesauri. This is a liaison ballot from TC37 Terminology and other language and content resources / SC4 Language resource management.”

From Cindy: “NISO can only submit a vote recommendation and any comments. We can, however, nominate an expert to work on this project (if approved). If there is interest in applying this standard to Knowledge Organization Systems, it is strongly recommended that someone from the NISO community participate in the standard’s development, as it is unlikely that the experts coming from the TC37 community will have an understanding of that viewpoint. If you wish to nominate an expert, please provide the name and contact information in your comments.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is Monday, Sept. 20, 2010.

As is usual with ISO ballots, ALA recommends a voting position to NISO but does not vote directly. Since the reference document is in a password-protected area of the NISO web site, ALA members must contact Cindy for a copy. Cindy can be contacted directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu and requests must include confirmation of ALA membership. Please copy me on the request (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so I can track LITA interest.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. Systematic Review: ISO 9230:2007, Determination of price indexes for print and electronic media purchased by libraries.

“This International Standard specifies a method for the determination of price indexes relating to the prices of print and electronic media acquired by libraries. It is not meant for calculating a price index of the national media production. The media included are restricted to books, serials and databases. This second edition has been expanded to cover electronic as well as printed books and serials, and electronic databases.”

2. Systematic Review: ISO 15706-2:2007, International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN)–Part 2: Version identifier

“This part of ISO 15706 establishes a voluntary system for the identification of versions of audiovisual works and other content derived from or closely related to an audiovisual work. It is based on the International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN) system defined in ISO 15706. An ISAN combined with the version segment specified in Clause 4 of this part of ISO 15706 constitutes an ISAN version identifier, hereinafter referred to as a V-ISAN. A V-ISAN is a registered, globally unique identifier for versions of an audiovisual work and related content.”

As usual, Cindy can provide access to the relevant documents only to ALA members interested in providing comment on the standards—please contact her directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com so I can track LITA interest).

Deadline for comments to Cindy on both reviews is: Aug. 25, 2010.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. Liaison ballot for ISO/FDIS 29383, Terminology policies — Development and implementation.

“This International Standard provides policy makers in governments, administration, non-profit and commercial organizations with guidelines and a methodology for the development and implementation of a comprehensive policy or strategy concerning the planning and management of terminology. This International Standard is designed for policy makers working in different environments, from language planning to for-profit companies.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is May 18, 2010 .

2. ISO/NP 14641-1 , Electronic archiving – Specifications concerning the design and the operation of an information system for electronic information preservation.

This is a short turn-around ballot to provide comments for a liaison new work item proposal. Deadline for comments to Cindy is May 11, 2010.

“This proposal is to develop a standard providing a set of technical specifications and organizational policies to be implemented for capture, archival and access of Electronically Stored Information (ESI); ensuring legibility, integrity and traceability of this information for the duration of their preservation and use. This standard is applicable to permanent archives and therefore does not refer to systems in which users have the ability to substitute or alter ESI after capture.”

Since these are liaison ballots, NISO can only “recommend” a U.S. vote and provide comments. Feedback from ALA members will be provided to NISO, who will review and consider our feedback along with that received from numerous other voting members. Cindy can provide access to the documents only to ALA members—please contact her directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com so I can track LITA interest).

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

“This standard provides generic advice on how to create content of classification systems and how to express that content in multilingual environments. It primarily specifies the factors that need to be considered when creating and populating a classification system that will be used in diverse linguistic environments. These factors include the specification of principles for incorporating internationalization aspects into classification systems, and maintaining and using those aspects for the structuring of activities, products, services, agents, and other entities of a company or organization.”

Cindy is looking for feedback from ALA members on the topic of whether ALA believes that NISO should approve or disapprove the standard. Any ALA member who wishes to see a copy of the draft standard for the purpose of offering comments prior to the deadline should contact Cindy directly (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu). To save time (yours and Cindy’s), please include a statement in your message to her that you ARE a current ALA member, and please copy me on the message as well (metadata.maven@gmail.com).

Comments are due to Cindy by June 10, 2010.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The first issue concerns a proposed change in scope for ISO TC46/SC11/WG11 – Risk identification and management for records.

The committee resolved to make this change at its meeting in October 2009 in Orlando, Florida because the project, ISO 13069 (N874) did not address the specific needs of the recordkeeping industry. The new scope, and the new standards proposed, fit better with the Management Systems for Records series of standards.

The earlier draft for this project was using the DRAMBORA repository audit method as the basis for the standard. ISO received a number of comments that the working draft was too repository-oriented and not records-oriented. This is one of the issues that the committee is trying to address in re-working the scope and starting fresh.

Cindy notes: “If any ALA member would like to see the full document in question (Decision to Establish a Subcommittee) OR **if you would like to volunteer or nominate someone for the working group,** (there is currently no US member on the group) please contact me directly at: hslcindy@buffalo.edu. If I hear nothing by this coming Friday, I will vote to agree to the new scope.”

The second issue concerns ISO/IEC/WD 27037 – Guidelines for identification, collection and/or acquisition and preservation of digital evidence.

From the working draft document:

“This International Standard provides guidelines for digital evidence management. It describes the processes of identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of potential digital evidence that may be of evidentiary value. The objective is to assist organizations in their disciplinary procedures, and to facilitate the exchange of potential digital evidence between jurisdictions. This standard deals with common situations encountered throughout the digital management process. The potential digital evidence may be sourced from any type of media, and refers to data that is already in a digital format. This International Standard does not attempt to cover the conversion of analog data into digital format.

The International Standard intends to provide guidance to those individuals responsible for the identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of potential digital evidence. These individuals include DEFRs, Digital Evidence Specialists, incident response specialists and forensic laboratory managers. This International Standard intends to inform decision-makers that need to determine the reliability of digital evidence presented to them. This International Standard can be adopted and used by organizations needing to collect, protect, analyze and present potential digital evidence. It is relevant to policy-making bodies that create and evaluate procedures relating to digital evidence, often as part of a larger body of evidence.

Application of this International Standard requires compliance with national laws, rules and regulations. The International Standard outlines the minimum requirements necessary for enabling transfer of digital evidence between jurisdictions. It provides a framework for the development of processes and procedures for the identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of digital evidence.”

The ballot in question is designed to solicit comments on a second working draft, not to enter a final vote on the standard. ALA members can contact Cindy at hslcindy@buffalo.edu to see the full (42 p.) document in question. Please confirm that you are a member of the American Library Association in your request.

As an additional note, Cynthia Hodgson from NISO is soliciting nominees to work on a revision to ISO 2789, International Library Statistics. If you would like to volunteer yourself or nominate someone else from the U.S. for this working group, please email Cynthia directly (chodgson@niso.org) no later than March 31, 2010. She will need full contact information.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

This ballot is in three parts:

Part 1: Overview and statement of principles
Part 2: Guidelines and functional requirements for records in electronic office environments
Part 3: Guidelines and functional requirements for records in business systems

As a reminder of the process: ALA is a voting member of NISO, while NISO is the official US voting member of other International Organization for Standardization (ISO) groups. On behalf of ALA, Cindy will be providing feedback to NISO as to whether ALA believes that NISO should approve or disapprove the standard. NISO staff will review and consider our feedback along with that received from numerous other voting members.

Because this is an ISO standard, access to the text for review is only available via Cindy (her email is: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu). Any ALA member who wishes to see a copy of the draft standard must explicitly state to Cindy that he/she is a current ALA member. (It helps me to provide activity information to LITA if you also copy me on your request at metadata.maven@gmail.com).

Deadline for comments to Cindy is Monday, May 17, 2010.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

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

In accordance with NISO procedures, all review ballots are accompanied by a recommendation from the responsible leadership committee. The first four standards are recommended for reaffirmation by NISO’s Content and Collection Management Topic Committee (Disclosure: I’m a member of that Committee). The last standard is recommended for reaffirmation by NISO’s Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee. When either committee has included some contextual information along with that recommendation, I’ve included it below.

NISO encourages us to provide comments with ALA’s vote that might provide the Topic Committees with additional information regarding use of the standards. The deadline for feedback to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) regarding these ballots is Jan. 6, 2010. Wouldn’t reading and commenting on one (or more) of these standards be a great thing to do for your community this holiday season?

1. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.18-2005, Scientific and Technical Reports – Preparation, Presentation, and Preservation.

URL for download: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-18-2005

2. ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies.

URL for download: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-19-2005

“This recommendation is made based on feedback of current use of this standard; the openness and availability of NISO standards; and because of the current activity in this area, particularly as relates to interoperability, with SKOS, and at the ISO level. At the ISO level, this standard relates to ISO 2788, Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri. There is also ISO 5864, Documentation — Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri. There is currently work underway to merge these two standards, into a new revised ISO standard, ISO 25964-1, Information and documentation — Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies — Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval. This is currently at DIS ballot, to close March 26, 2010. There is also a part 2 being developed, Information and documentation — Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies — Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies. This is still in development.”

3. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.29-2005, Bibliographic References.

URL for download: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-29-2005

4. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.84-2005, Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier.

URL for download: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-84-2005

“This recommendation is made based on current activity related to this standard. At this time, the whole DOI system (syntax, resolution, metadata, and unifying infrastructures) is proceeding through ISO, with an expected publication in 2010. Following reaffirmation and upon finalization of the ISO effort, the Topic Committee will be studying the standard more closely to determine if revision might be needed for Z39.84. Feedback from the Z39.84 Maintenance Agency (the International DOI Foundation) regarding some changes needed to the standard has already been received. You are encouraged to provide comments with your vote that might provide the TC with additional information regarding needs for a revision or about current use of the standard. Please note that a revision can begin at any time following the reaffirmation of the current standard.”

5. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004, The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services.

URL for download: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-88-2004

I hope that some of you will take up the challenge here and take a new look at some of these standards and make comments to Cindy (feel free to start discussions on the LITA-L list about any concerns you might have).

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

“This part of ISO 3166 establishes codes that represent the current names of countries, dependencies, and other areas of particular geopolitical interest, on the basis of lists of country names obtained from the United Nations. It is intended for use in any application requiring the expression of current country names in coded form; it also includes basic guidelines for its implementation and maintenance.”

“This standard is managed differently from other ISO standards due to the ongoing changes to or additions of country codes. The maintenance agency regularly issues a newsletter with new or changed codes. Those codes are added to the standard’s country code database and become usable when the newsletter is issued. So it is not necessary to revise the standard just to incorporate those new codes. The main reason for voting for a revision would be if the “principles” for establishing the codes, as defined in the standard, need to be changed or updated. There is already a corrigendum (correction supplement) for the standard, which is also included as a reference to this ballot. If the standard were to be revised, these corrections would be merged to the revision. For more information on the ISO 3166-1 standard and how it is managed, see: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm“

As usual, these ISO standards documents are not openly available, but ALA members can request documents for the purpose of review and comment from Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com). Please be sure to state explicitly that you ARE a current ALA member — Cindy cannot send you a document without this assurance.

Deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Monday, Feb. 15, 2010.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. Systematic Review, IS0 9706:1994, Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence.

“The purpose of this International Standard is to provide a means of specifying and identifying paper that, according to the present state of knowledge, has a high degree of permanence and is likely to undergo little or no change in properties that influence readability and handling when stored in a protected environment for long periods of time.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010.

2. IS0 11108:1996, Archival paper – Requirements for permanence and durability.

“This International Standard specifies the requirements for archival paper. It is applicable to unprinted papers intended for documents and publications required for permanent retention and frequent use. For these documents and publications, paper of high permanence and high durability is required.”

Deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2010.

As usual, these ISO standards documents are not openly available, but ALA members can request documents for the purpose of review and comment from Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com). Be sure to state explicitly that you ARE a current ALA member — Cindy cannot send you a document without this assurance.

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm these standards. If you believe ALA should recommend another option, you must provide comments for Cindy to pass along with ALA’s recommendation.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The first group of announcements has to do with special character sets and transliteration.

1. Systematic Review ISO 10754:1996, Extension of the Cyrillic alphabet coded character set for non-Slavic languages for bibliographic information interchange.

“This is version three of the standard that specifies a set of 93 graphic characters with their coded representations. It consists of a code table and a legend showing each graphic, its use and its name. Explanatory notes are also included. The character set is primarily intended for the interchange of information among data processing systems and within message transmission systems.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Monday, Feb. 22, 2010.

2. Systematic Review ISO 233-3:1999, Transliteration of Persian characters into Latin characters.

“This part of ISO 233 establishes a simplified system for the transliteration of Persian characters into Latin characters. This simplification of the stringent rules established by ISO 233:1984 is especially intended to facilitate the processing of bibliographic information (e.g. catalogues, indices, citations, etc.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Friday, Feb. 19, 2010.

3. Systematic Review IS0 9984:1996, Transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters.

“This International Standard establishes a system for the transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters in accordance with the principles of stringent conversion in order to permit international information exchange, particularly by electronic means.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010.

ISO standards documents are not openly available, but ALA members can request documents for the purpose of review and comment from Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please also copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com). Please be sure to state explicitly that you ARE a current ALA member — Cindy will not send you a document without this assurance.

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm these standards. If you believe ALA should recommend another option, you must provide comments for Cindy to pass along with ALA’s recommendation.

More announcements to come …

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The first is for ISO/DIS 27729, International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). The ISNI “… specifies the International Standard name identifier (ISNI) for the identification of public identities of parties; that is, the identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains.”

This standard could be of particular interest to those librarians interested in the future of external name files in the cataloging world and prospects for using non-library data.

The second ballot is for ISO/DIS 25964-1, Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies, Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval (Revision of ISO 2788:1986 and of ISO 5964:1985). The announcement says, in part:

“This part of ISO 25964 gives recommendations for the development and maintenance of thesauri intended for information retrieval applications. The document also provides a data model and recommended format for import and export of thesaurus data. This part of this International Standard applies to monolingual and multilingual thesauri.”

As usual, ALA doesn’t vote directly on these, but provides feedback to NISO for their vote (along with other NISO voting members).

Cindy is authorized to provide a draft to ALA members who wish to comment on either standard—she can be contacted directly via email at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Be sure to include in the message a statement that you are a current ALA member (and please also copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com, thanks!)

Comments on ISNI are due to Cindy by Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010, and for ISO/DIS 25964 are due by Friday, Mar. 5, 2010.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The announcement states:

“This International Standard specifies the syntax, description and resolution functional components of the digital object identifier (DOI®) system, and the general principles for the creation, registration and administration of DOI names. This standard also describes how the DOI system can be used with existing ISO identification systems, including the provision of additional functionality (such as resolution) where this is not already available.”

Cindy points out that this may be our last opportunity to make substantive comments to this standard. If there is 100% approval, the standard can go directly to publication. Comments from ALA members can influence the NISO vote (ALA does not vote on ISO standards directly).

Cindy is authorized to provide a draft to ALA members who wish to comment—she can be contacted directly via email at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Be sure to include in the message a statement that you are a current ALA member (and please also copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com, thanks!) Comments are due to Cindy by Friday, Feb. 12, 2010.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

From the announcement:

“The scope of this International Standard is to present requirements when including resolvable persistent identifiers (PID) with references to and citations of language resources in documents as well as in language resources themselves. This standard addresses issues of persistence and granularity of references to resources, by first requiring that persistent references be implemented by using a PID framework and further imposing requirements on any PID frameworks used for this purpose.”

“Note that this standard makes reference to ISO 690-2 (bibliographic citations for electronic resources), which is in the process of revision and merger with 690-1. The standard at ballot also mentions its relationship to DOI, ARK, and PURL (among others). The ISO DOI System standard will be issued for a DIS ballot shortly.”

For the purposes of reviewing this standard at ballot (and only for that purpose), the draft versions of the new ISO 690 standard and the DOI system standard will be made available.

ALA members who wish to see a copy of the draft standard for the purpose of offering comments prior to the deadline (Jan. 11, 2010) should contact Cindy directly (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu). Please be sure to let her know explicitly in your message that you are a current ALA member. Please also copy me on your request (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so that I can keep track of interest of LITA members.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. ISO/FDIS 16245, Boxes, file covers and other enclosures, made from cellulosic materials, for storage. This ballot is for the final draft standard, described thusly:

“This International Standard specifies requirements for boxes and file covers, made of cellulosic material, to be used for long term storage of documents on paper or parchment. It is applicable to boxes made of solid or corrugated board and to file covers made of paper or board. It can also be applicable to other types of enclosure for long-term storage such as cases, portfolios, tubes and envelopes made of cellulosic material. It is NOT applicable to storage of photographic materials.”

When commenting to Cindy keep in mind that at this final stage a “Yes” vote can only have editorial non-substantive comments. Cindy’s deadline for comments is Friday, Oct. 9, 2009. The draft is available from Cindy (you must be an ALA member and tell her so). Her email is: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com so that we can keep track of interest from these announcements).

2. New Work Item (NWI) Proposal: Simplified natural language – Part 1: Basic concepts and general principles (simpL-1). This is a proposal from the liaison committee TC37/SC4 (Terminology and other language and content resources / Language resource management) for a new work item.

In the 3-page work item proposal, the scope of the proposed project is given as follows:

Basic concepts and general principles concerning simplified natural languages facilitate:
-Reducing ambiguity;
-Speeding up reading;
-Improving comprehension for people whose first language is not the language of the document at hand;
-Improving comprehension for people with different domain or application background;
-Making human translation and localization easier, faster and more cost effective;
-Computer-assisted translation and machine translation.

In addition these general rules and principles constitute a systematic approach that can make cross-language and cross-domain applications of simplified natural languages more effective.

Since this is a liaison ballot, NISO can provide only a vote “recommendation” and comments. ALA is also permitted to nominate an expert to participate on the WG, if the project is approved. If anyone would like to nominate someone, please include the name and contact information in your comments to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu). She can also provide the work item proposal to ALA members interested in providing comments. Cindy’s deadline for comments is Friday, Nov. 6, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Call for experts document available from:
http://www.niso.org/apps/org/workgroup/tc46sc8interest/download.php/2772/N274_Information_on_the_establishment_of_a_new.pdf

Original project description and justification available from:
http://www.niso.org/apps/org/workgroup/tc46ballots/members/standards/new160/manage/modify_document.php

Cindy notes: “If anyone knows an ALA member who has the expertise required to serve on this project and who would be willing to put in the necessary time/effort, please send me that individual’s name and contact information to forward to NISO. This will be a terrific opportunity for the right person!”

The initial meeting of the working group will be in early December, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. New Work Item: ISO/WD 32000-2, Document management — Portable document format: Part 2: PDF 2.0. This is a liaison ballot from TC171/SC2 to approve a new work item and the working draft for the standard. This part of the PDF standard will add new features to ISO 32000-1 including support for geospatial data to images, support SWF navigation for collections, adds general rich media annotation type, support for barcodes, adds PRC to list of supported 3D models, adds structure elements for MathML, and enhances the accessibility.

US TAG members may “recommend” a US vote and provide comments. We may also nominate an expert to participate on this project. If anyone is interested in working on this project, please indicate the name and contact information in your comments.

The deadline for feedback to Cindy is Friday, Sept. 11, 2009 (that’s today folks, sorry!)

2. ISO/CD 19005-2, Electronic document file format for long-term preservation — Part 2: (PDF/A-2). This is a liaison ballot, and the earliest, committee draft stage, and the best opportunity to get any substantive changes to the standard. This part of ISO 19005 extends the capabilities of PDF/A described in Part 1 of ISO 19005 and is based on PDF version 1.7 (as defined in ISO 32000-1) rather than PDF version 1.4 which is used as the basis of Part 1. The added capabilities provided by this part of ISO 19005 are through compliance with PDF version 1.7 and many of the features enabled by that version include: 1) Improvements to tagged PDF (for enhanced accessibility; 2) Compressed Object and XRef streams (for smaller file sizes; 3) PDF/A-compliant file attachments, portable collections and PDF packages; 4) Transparency; and 5) JPEG 2000 compression.

Deadline for ALA member comments to Cindy is Monday, Sept. 14, 2009.

3. ISO/CD 14289, Electronic document file format enhancement for accessibility (PDF/UA). This is another liaison ballot, as well as the best opportunity to get any substantive changes to the standard. The primary purpose of this International Standard is to define an implementation of ISO 32000-2, known as PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) that provides a mechanism for representing electronic documents rendered in the PDF format in a manner that allows the file to be accessible. These goals are accomplished by identifying the set of PDF components that may be used, as well as restrictions on the form of their use, within conforming PDF/UA files. PDF/UA is intended as a companion standard, to be used in conjunction with ISO 32000, ISO 19005, ISO 15930, and other standards as may apply for the purpose of achieving accessibility.

Deadline for ALA member comments to Cindy is Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2009.

4. ISO/CD 14641, Specifications concerning the design and the operation of an information system for electronic document preservation. This is again a liaison ballot and the earliest, committee draft stage, the best opportunity to get any substantive changes to the standard. This standard provides a set of technical specifications and organizational policies to be implemented for capture, archival and access of digital documents; ensuring legibility, integrity and traceability of these documents for the duration of their preservation and use. This standard is applicable to fixed-content documents and therefore does not refer to systems in which users have the ability to substitute or alter documents after capture.

Deadline for ALA member comments to Cindy is Friday, Sept. 25, 2009.

Since the reference documents for these standards are in a password protected area of the NISO web site, ALA members should request the document directly from Cindy, at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Please also copy me (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so we can keep track of interest in these standards announcements.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. Systematic Review ISO 21127:2006, a ballot for the published standard, ISO 21127:2006, Information and documentation — A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information. This is the first edition of the standard that is intended to facilitate the exchange of information between cultural heritage institutions by defining a domain ontology for cultural heritage information. (Cindy’s deadline for comments is Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009).

2. Systematic Review ISO 12083:1994, a ballot for the published standard, ISO 12083:1994, Information and documentation — Electronic manuscript preparation and markup. This is the first edition of the International Standard that presents four document type definitions and additional facilities conforming to ISO 8879, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). (Cindy’s deadline for comments is Monday, Nov. 23, 2009).

3. Systematic Review ISO 2789:2006, a ballot for the published standard, ISO 2789:2006, Information and documentation — International library statistics. This is the 4th edition of the International Standard that specifies rules for the library and information services community on the collection and reporting of statistics for the purposes of international reporting. (Cindy’s deadline for comments is Friday, Nov. 20, 2009).

4. ISO/CD 13390, Records management systems — Fundamentals and vocabulary. This is a new standard developed to be the basis of the framework for the ISO 30200 family of standards: Management System for Records. It describes fundamentals of a Management System for Records, which form the subject of the ISO 30200 family, and defines related terms. All other standards in the family use the vocabulary defined in this standard. (Cindy’s deadline for comments is Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009).

5. ISO/CD 13391, Management system for records – Requirements. This is a new standard that specifies requirements for a Management System for Records where an organizations needs to demonstrate its ability to create and control records from its business activities for as long as they are required. It is part of the ISO 30200 family of standards, which is being developed within the management system standards framework to be compatible and to share elements and methodology with other Management System Standards. (Cindy’s deadline for comments is Monday, Sept. 21, 2009).

Any ALA member who wishes to see a copy of the draft standards for the purpose of offering comments prior to the deadline may contact Cindy directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (I’d appreciate it if you’d copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com so I can keep track of interest). Please be sure to let Cindy know you are a current ALA member. In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm the ISO standards noted above.

The remaining requests for comment are for two new proposed NISO work items:

1. Physical Delivery of Library Resources.
The goal of this work item is to develop a statement of best practices related to the delivery of library materials. To achieve this objective, this proposal is to convene a NISO Working Group to explore the problem and deliver a Recommended Practice document describing possible solutions and to implement an education and adoption plan for encouraging implementation of the solution(s). The proposal was approved by the Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee on July 24, 2009, and is now being sent to the NISO voting membership for agreement to begin a new work project and to elicit expressions of interest in participating in the work.
If you are interested in reviewing the proposal, you can access it via the following link:
http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view?item_key=e8326f4b6682b07a4cca85967a6cbb0808bf7723 or from the NISO homepage.

Deadline for your comments/feedback to Cindy is Friday, Aug. 21, 2009.

2. Standardized Markup for Journal Articles
The goal of this work item is to take the currently existing National Library of Medicine (NLM) Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite version 3.0, the three journal article schemas, and the documentation and shepherd it through the NISO standardization process. The intent of this proposal is for the Tag Suite to be a NISO standard and each of the schemas to be a “sub-standard” or appendix to the Tag Suite standard. To achieve this objective, this proposal is to convene a NISO Working Group with the intention of proposing that the Tag Suite, as it currently stands, be accepted as a Draft Standard following a brief period of review within the group.
If you are interested in reviewing the proposal, you can access it via the following link:
http://www.niso.org/standards/ballots/#nlm> or from the NISO Homepage.

Deadline for your comments/feedback to Cindy is Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

From the ballot text;

“An ISIL identifies an organization, i.e. a library, an archive, a museum or a related organization, or one of its subordinate units, which is responsible for an action or service in an informational environment (e.g. creation of machine-readable information), throughout its life. It can be used to identify the originator or holder of a resource (e.g. library material or collection in an archive). It is intended to have a minimum impact on already existing systems.”

As usual, ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the US vote. Permission is granted by the American National Standards Institute to reproduce this International Standard for the purpose of review and comment related to the preparation of a US position, PROVIDED THIS NOTICE IS INCLUDED. ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE RESERVED.

Any ALA member wishing to see a copy of this draft standard for the purpose of offering comments prior to the deadline may contact Cindy directly (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) — please be sure to let her know you are an ALA member. I’d appreciate it if you’d also copy me on your request, so we know how much interest there is in this standard (metadata.maven@gmail.com). Your deadline for comments to Cindy is Monday, Aug. 24, 2009.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The text of this ballot says in part:

“This is the third edition of the Standard that establishes the basic principles and methods for preparing and compiling terminologies both inside and outside the framework of standardization, and describes the links between objects, concepts, and their terminological representations. It also establishes general principles governing the formation of designations and the formulation of definitions. This International Standard does not stipulate procedures for the layout of international terminology standards, which are treated in ISO 10241.”

As usual, ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.

Since the document is in a restricted area of the NISO website, ALA members who wish to review the standard and provide comment must apply directly to Cindy (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) for a copy of the document. I’d appreciate it if you could copy me as well (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so I can keep track of general interest in standards review for LITA.

Cindy’s deadline for comment is July 16, 2009 (right after ALA Annual).

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

1. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39-41-1997 (R2002), Printed Information on Spines. This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, ANSI/NISO Z39-41-1997 (R2002), Printed Information on Spines. It is available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-41-1997r2002/.

NISO’s Content and Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee recommends a vote of REAFFIRM WITH TITLE AND ABSTRACT CHANGE. The CCM is recommending the following title and abstract change to better reflect the content of the standard. Such a change can be made as part of the reaffirmation and does not constitute a revision to the content of the standard.

CURRENT TITLE: Printed Information on Spines
NEW PROPOSED TITLE: Placement Guidelines for Information on Spines
CURRENT ABSTRACT: Describes how to format information on the spines of printed bindings, covers, containers, or other protective enclosures. It describes both the kinds of information to be printed on spines and the order and placement of the information.
NEW PROPOSED ABSTRACT: Describes and allocates areas on the spines of printed bindings, covers, containers, or other protective enclosures. It describes, at a high level, both the kinds of information to be printed on spines and the order and placement of the information.

Cindy’s deadline for comment is May 27, 2009.

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2. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1993 (R2003), ANSEL. This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1993 (R2003), Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use (ANSEL). It is available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-47-1993r2003/.

NISO’s Content and Collection Management Topic Committee recommends a vote of WITHDRAW. The Topic Committee recommends this vote for the following reasons:

1. MARC records currently used by libraries are converted to the encoding standards supported by systems such as Windows and UNIX.
2. UNIMARC has already moved to full Unicode, and US MARC distributed using marcxml is also in Unicode.
3. ANSEL cannot support software developments that support language-sensitive search and retrieve, and requires programming to map ANSEL-based data to newer standards in order to be processed by computer operating system and database systems.

ANSEL had an important role in making it possible for bibliographic utilities to exchange data that contained diacritics characters that were not covered by ANSI ASCII at a time when no standard existed outside of the library community. However, since then ISO and NISO have developed several standards for character encoding (e.g., ISO 8859-1 [Latin-1], ISO 8859-2, and ISO 10646 [Unicode]) that have been widely adopted and accepted by many communities, including libraries.
The Content and Collection Management Topic Committee therefore believes that the Z39.47 standard should be referenced only when there is a need to map or convert old data, something that can be done by referencing the withdrawn standard, and that it would not be in the best interests of the information community to maintain it as an active NISO/ANSI standard any longer.

If withdrawal is approved, the standard will be removed from the list of approved NISO standards. The standard will remain available as a withdrawn standard for five (5) years.)

The deadline for comments to Cindy is May 28, 2009. Cindy has indicated that if she does not hear from anyone within ALA, she will vote on behalf of ALA to withdraw: ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1993 (R2003), Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use (ANSEL).

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3. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R2002), Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives. This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R2002), available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-48-1992r2002/.

NISO’s Content and Collection Management Topic Committee recommends a vote of REAFFIRM WITH ABSTRACT CHANGE. An additional final sentence to the abstract is proposed. The proposed abstract change is considered editorial and can be done as part of a reaffirmation; it does not constitute a revision to the standard.

CURRENT ABSTRACT: This standard establishes criteria for coated and uncoated paper that will last several hundred years without significant deterioration under normal use and storage conditions in libraries and archives. This standard identifies the specific properties of such paper and specifies the tests required to demonstrate these properties.

PROPOSED NEW ABSTRACT: This standard establishes criteria for coated and uncoated paper that will last several hundred years without significant deterioration under normal use and storage conditions in libraries and archives. This standard identifies the specific properties of such paper and specifies the tests required to demonstrate these properties. The standard does not address environmental impact issues of manufacturing.

Cindy’s deadline for comments on this ballot is May 26, 2009.

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4. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.56-1996 (R2002), Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI). This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-56-1996r2002/.

NISO’s Content and Collection Management Topic Committee recommends a vote of REAFFIRM. If reaffirmed, the Topic Committee will be studying the standard more closely to determine if a revision might be needed for Z39.56 in the near future, particularly with regard to larger issues of identification and existing applications using SICI. You are encouraged to provide comments with your vote that might provide the Topic Committee with additional information regarding needs for a future revision. Please note that a revision can begin at any time, with the Voting Members approval, following the reaffirmation of a standard; it need not wait for the next 5-year periodic review.

Cindy’s deadline for comments on this ballot is May 22, 2009.

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5. Registration Authority for the soon to be issued revision of ISO 10957, The International Standard Music Number.

Cindy notes:

“The TC46/SC9 committee has asked the ISO Technical Management Board to approve continuation of the International ISMN Agency as the Registration Authority for the soon to be issued revision of ISO 10957, The International Standard Music Number. The ISMN Agency is located in Berlin; additional information about them can be found here: http://www.ismn-international.org/international.html. ISO is now asking the national standards bodies’ members for their approval of this recommendation. Since NISO is the Technical Advisory Group for TC46, we need to provide the U.S. vote to ANSI.”

From NISO:

“Since SC9, for which NISO is the Secretariat, has already approved this appointment, because it is not a new appointment, and because there is a very short turn-around to respond to this matter, we are not issuing a formal ballot on this appointment. Instead we are asking any voting members who have any objection to this appointment or comments on it to notify NISO no later than close of business on Wednesday, April 29, 2009. If we do not hear from you by then, we will assume you have no objection to this appointment.”

Cindy asks that, should any member have a problem with an ALA voting affirmatively, she needs to hear no later than Monday, April 27, 2009. NISO will assume ALA’s approval if they do not hear otherwise.
Cindy can be contacted at: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu.

That’s all for now, but keep alert for new waves of activity!

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

So here, in the order I got them, with deadlines in bold:

1. ANSI/NISO/ISO 12083-1995 (R2002), Electronic Manuscript Preparation and Markup.

This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, ANSI/NISO/ISO 12083-1995 (R2002), Electronic Manuscript Preparation and Markup. This standard is a national adoption of the international standard ISO 12083:1994. It is available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/iso12083-1995r2002/.

Comments on this standard are due to Cindy by May 13, 2009.

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2. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.2-1994 (R2001), Information Interchange Format. This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.2-1994 (R2001), Information Interchange Format. It is available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-2-1994R2001/.

The international version of this standard ISO 2709, Information and documentation — Format for information exchange, was revised in 2008 to clarify the use of Unicode with UTF-8 encoding for records employing this standard. In appropriate places the term “octet” was used in place of “character”.

In accordance with NISO procedures, all review ballots are accompanied by a recommendation from the responsible leadership committee. NISO’s Content and Collection Topic Committee recommends a vote of “Withdrawal” for ANSI/NISO Z39.2-1994 (R2001), in favor of the use of ISO 2709. The NISO version (Z39.2) would continue to be available on the NISO website as a withdrawn standard.

Cindy’s deadline for comments on this review is May 12, 2009.

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3. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.14-1997 (R2002), Guidelines for Abstracts. This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.14-1997 (R2002), Guidelines for Abstracts. It is available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-14-1997R2002/.

NISO’s Content and Collection Management Topic Committee recommends a vote of REAFFIRM for ANSI/NISO Z39.14-1997 (R2002). If reaffirmed, the Topic Committee will then study the standard more closely to determine if and why a revision might be needed for Z39.14. A reaffirmation now will provide additional time to do a more thorough study of this standard. You are encouraged to provide comments with your vote that might provide the Topic Committee with additional information regarding the possible need for a future revision. Please note that a revision can begin at any time after the reaffirmation of the current standard (with NISO voting member approval); it is not necessary to wait until the next 5-year periodic review.

Cindy’s deadline for comments on this review is May 11, 2009.

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4. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.23-1997 (R2002), Standard Technical Report Number Format and Creation. This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, and is available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-23-1997r2002/.

If reaffirmed, the Topic Committee will then study the standard more closely to determine if and why a revision might be needed. A reaffirmation now will provide additional time to do a more thorough study of this standard. You are encouraged to provide comments with your vote that might provide the Topic Committee with additional information regarding the possible need for a future revision. Please note that a revision can begin at any time after the reaffirmation of the current standard (with NISO voting member approval); it is not necessary to wait until the next 5-year periodic review.

The deadline for comments to Cindy on this review is May 21, 2009.

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5. Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.26-1997 (R2002), Micropublishing Product Information. This is a periodic review ballot for the published standard, which is available for download from: http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-26-1997r2002/.

In accordance with NISO procedures, all review ballots are accompanied by a recommendation from the responsible leadership committee. NISO’s Content and Collection Management Topic Committee recommends a vote of REAFFIRM.

The deadline for comments to Cindy on this ballot is May 19, 2009.

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All comments to Cindy can be sent to her at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Expect another wave of announcements shortly …

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Cindy Hepfer, the ALA Voting Representative to NISO notes: “In accordance with NISO’s Operating Procedures, all review ballots are accompanied with a recommended action from the leadership group managing the review. NISO’s Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee recommends a vote of ‘Reaffirm’ for ANSI/NISO Z39.89-2003, The U.S. National Z39.50 Profile for Library Applications. As a member of the voting pool, we are required to vote on this ballot.”

ALA’s options are:
• Reaffirm with no change
• Revise (If this action is approved, NISO will appoint a Working Group to develop the revised standard. The current version remains in effect until a revised version is approved.)
• Withdraw (If this action is approved, the standard will be removed from the list of approved NISO standards. The standard will remain available as a withdrawn standard for five (5) years.)

Cindy adds: “Unless I hear otherwise from ALA members, I will vote on the organization’s behalf to reaffirm this important standard with no change. However, if anyone within ALA has revisions to suggest or believes that the standard should be withdrawn, please contact me (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) and be prepared with very solid reasons. The deadline for you to respond to me is May 7.”

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

“This year NISO has launched a new Chair’s Initiative–a project of the chair of NISO’s Board of Directors, focusing on a specific issue that would benefit from study and the development of a recommended practice or standard. Oliver Pesch, NISO’s current Board of Directors Chair, has chosen the issue of perfecting a seamless, item-level linking through single sign-on authentication technologies in a networked information environment. This Work Item Proposal follows NISO’s February 11, 2009 webinar “SSO Authentication: Understanding the Pieces of the Puzzle.” The proposal was approved by the Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee on March 16, 2009, and is now being sent to the NISO voting membership for agreement to begin a new work project and to elicit expressions of interest in participating in the work. NISO Working Group participation is not limited to NISO members.

The goal of this work item is to explore practical solutions for improving the success of SSO authentication technologies for providing a seamless experience for the user and to promote the adoption of one or more of these solutions to make the access improvements a reality. To achieve this objective, this proposal is to convene a NISO working group to explore the problem and deliver one or more Recommended Practice documents describing possible solutions and to implement an education and adoption plan for encouraging implementation of the solution(s).”

A three page proposal is available at http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/1504/NISOProposedWorkItem_SSO6feb09.doc.

Cindy explains that the voting options are “Yes” (approve the project), “No” (do not approve the project), “Abstain” (from voting). Comments are required for No votes. She adds, “If ALA would like to nominate someone to participate on the working group (if the project is approved), I can provide a name and contact information. So please let me know if there are individuals I should nominate, and please provide their contact information and perhaps a brief statement regarding their interest/expertise in this area. If you have any questions, please contact me. If I do not hear a darned good reason to vote otherwise, I intend to vote YES on behalf of ALA on the proposed SSO Authentication work item.” The deadline for comments to Cindy on this work item is Wednesday, April 15.

The second item in this group from Cindy involves a review ballot for ANSI/NISO Z39.50-2003, Information Retrieval: Application Service Definition & Protocol Specification. A copy of this standard can be found in the list of NISO standards at http://www.niso.org/kst/reports/standards/. Z39.50-2003 is currently available — for free — by going to page 3, clicking on View Details area beside Z39.50 and then clicking on the PDF link from that page.

In accordance with NISO’s Operating Procedures, all review ballots distributed are accompanied with a recommended action from the leadership group managing the review. NISO’s Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee is managing this review, and recommends a vote of “Reaffirm” for ANSI/NISO Z39.50-2003, Information Retrieval: Application Service Definition & Protocol Specification.

As a member of the voting pool, ALA is required to vote on this ballot, with one of the following voting options:
–Reaffirm with no change
–Revise (If this action is approved, NISO will appoint a Working Group to develop the revised standard. The current version remains in effect until a revised version is approved)
–Withdraw (If this action is approved, the standard will be removed from the list of approved NISO standards. The standard will remain available as a withdrawn standard for five (5) years)

Recommendations to vote either Revise or Withdraw should be accompanied by comments.
Cindy adds: “Unless I hear otherwise from ALA members, I will vote on the organization’s behalf to reaffirm this important standard with no change. However, if anyone within ALA has revisions to suggest or believes that the standard should be withdrawn, please contact me (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) and be prepared with very solid reasons. The deadline for you to respond to me is April 27. I will be leaving town on April 29 for several days and will be away from email. So if you have any negative feedback, reaching me even earlier than April 27 would be extremely helpful.”

The third item in this group of announcements is one from ISO, containing the ballot for ISO/DIS 29383, Terminology policies — Development and implementation. The text of this ballot is as follows:

“This is a liaison standard from ISO/TC 37, Terminology and other language and content resources, Subcommittee SC 1, Principles and methods. This standard was previously issued in two parts when it was a Committee Draft (CD). The Draft International Standard (DIS) version has now merged those parts into one standard. This International Standard provides campaigners, policy-makers and other decision makers in governments and administration, non-profit and commercial organizations with guidelines and a methodology for developing and implementing a comprehensive strategic plan for stating a terminology policy, i.e. a conscious, systematic and managed approach to the creation, maintenance and use of terminology in, and for, defined user communities.”

Because this is ISO, not NISO, those interested in reviewing the proposed standard and providing feedback to NISO (via Cindy) as to whether to vote to approve or disapprove the standard must apply to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) for a copy of the text. Please include a statement of ALA membership when applying to Cindy for a copy, as she’s not authorized to supply copies to anyone other than ALA members. Cindy’s deadline for comments is a bit more generous for this one: July 22, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Joining the voting pools allows ALA to vote on the standard and provide comments once the review process has begun. Once the voting pools have been formed, separate ballots for each standard will be issued only to those who have joined the pool. If ALA does not join the pool for a particular standard, we are considered to be “abstaining” from any decision made regarding this standard’s reaffirmation ballot.
NISO needs at least 15% of the voting membership to join the pool. If less than 15% express interest in the standard, it may be referred to the NISO Board for administrative withdrawal.

The three standards in this Group 5 voting pool are:
1) ANSI/NISO Z39.9-1992 (R2001), International Standard Serial Numbering (ISSN)
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-9-1992/

2) ANSI/NISO Z39.76-1996 (R2002), Data Elements for Binding Library Materials
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-76-1996R2002/

3) ANSI/NISO Z39.20-1999, Criteria for Price Indexes for Print Library Materials
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-20-1999/

The ballot to select which voting pools ALA should opt into closes April 23. Cindy would like to have feedback from anyone who wishes to comment no later than April 16.

The second voting pool, not designated with a number, includes five additional NISO standards that are due to begin their reaffirmation reviews in 2009. The first four are the responsibility of the Content & Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee. The fifth standard is the responsibility of the Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee.

The five standards in this second voting pool are:
1) ANSI/NISO Z39.18-2005, Scientific and Technical Reports – Preparation, Presentation, and Preservation
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-18-2005/

2) ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-19-2005/

3) ANSI/NISO Z39.29-2005, Bibliographic References
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-29-2005/

4) ANSI/NISO Z39.84-2005, Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-84-2005/

5) ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004, The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-88-2004/

This second ballot to select which voting pools ALA should opt into closes April 30. Cindy would like to have feedback from anyone who wishes to comment no later than April 23. Unless she is presented with a compelling case not to opt ALA into these voting pools, she plans to opt the organization into the review process for all of these standards, all of which most definitely are of interest to libraries.

Please send comments to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Note that since these are NISO — not ISO — standards, you CAN review the documents in question directly at the URLs listed above.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

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.”

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.”

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The text supplied with this ballot explains:

“This is the first ballot on a new standard, ISO/CD 13028, Information and documentation — Implementation guidelines for digitisation of records. This Standard provides guidance for maintaining records in digital format only, where the original paper, or other non-digital source record, has been copied by digitising or other means. It sets out the best practice guidelines for digitisation processes to meet the requirements for trustworthiness and reliability of records.”

Cindy reminds us that this is not a NISO standard, but is being balloted by ISO. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider the feedback that it receives prior to submitting the US vote. ALA members can acquire a copy for review purposes by applying directly to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Please confirm in your request that you are an ALA member (and if possible copy me as well, at metadata.maven@gmail.com).

Comments are due to Cindy by April 24, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Information provided about this activity by NISO:

(1) “This is a proposal to initiate a new project within TC46/SC11 (Archives/Records Management) to develop a standard for Information and documentation – Management system for records – Fundamentals and vocabulary. This standard will describe fundamentals of a management system for records and define related terms. This standard is needed to form the basis of the “family” of management system for records standards by presenting the structure of the standards family and relationship to other management system standards.”
(2) “This standard will specify business requirements for a management system for records to enable an organization to fulfill its mandate, mission, strategy, and goals through the development and implementation of a records policy and objectives and the measurement and monitoring of performance. A records policy and objectives enable organizations to create and maintain records as evidence and information of their activities for as long as they are needed. This standard is needed to provide a basis for a “family” of records management standards as part of an overall management standards system (MSS).”

If you have an interest in either or both parts of this work, please let Cindy know by April 14, 2009. Your vote options are: Yes (approve the new project), No (do not approve the project), and Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for No and Abstain votes. If you vote Yes, please indicate, in the comments, any recommendation you may have for a U.S. expert to work on the standard’s development and provide contact information for the individual (an email and/or phone number at a minimum).

The draft of the proposal is available to ALA members by applying directly to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) and confirming your ALA membership. If you can, please copy me (metadata.maven@gmail.com) on your request.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

NISO has forwarded the following about this draft standard:

“This is a ballot for the draft standard, ISO/DIS 26162, Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content – Design, implementation and maintenance of terminology management systems. This ballot is from TC37 / SC3 (Terminology and other language and content resources / Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content).“

“ISO/DIS 26162 is one of a family of standards to facilitate the exchange of terminological data. This standard gives guidance on choosing the relevant data categories, designing and implementing a data model and a user interface of a terminology management system (TMS) with a view to the intended user group. The phases described here are indispensable for the successful development of a TMS and for avoiding costly errors. The standard may be used for choosing the appropriate TMS for a certain purpose. This standard is intended for terminologists, software developers and others who are involved in the process of developing or acquiring a TMS.”

As Cindy reminds us, ALA is a voting member of NISO, and NISO is the official U.S. voting member for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 46 on Information and Documentation. This is not a NISO standard, but is being balloted by ISO’s TC46. ALA is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.

If you have an interest in commenting on this work and recommending a vote, please let Cindy know by May 15, 2009. Your vote options are: Yes (approve the new project), No (do not approve the project), and Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for No and Abstain votes.

The draft standard is available to ALA members by applying directly to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) and confirming your ALA membership. If you can, please copy me (metadata.maven@gmail.com) on your request.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

From the ballot itself:

“This is a systematic review ballot of the published standard, ISO 23081-1, Information and documentation: Records management processes –Metadata for records –Part 1: Principles.”

If you’re thinking that this description isn’t very helpful, you’re not alone! I had, in fact, heard about this standard via another channel, and it sounds like one of those superficially boring but actually quite critical efforts, particularly if one thinks that “packaging” and sharing metadata in future is going to be quite different than it is in our current environment. This is essentially administrative or meta-metadata we’re talking about.

As usual, access to the proposed standard is only available by applying directly to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) –please don’t forget to confirm your ALA membership. Her deadline is no later than: Monday, May 25, 2009. Please also copy me (metadata.maven@gmail.com).

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

First: “ISO/DIS 28560-1, RFID in librairies– Part 1: General requirements.” Part 1 establishes an abstract data model for the use of RFID tags.

Second: “ISO/DIS 28560- 2, RFID in librairies –Part 2: Encoding based on ISO/IEC 15962.” Part 2 deals with the encoding rules based on ISO/IEC 15962, which uses an object identifier structure to identify data elements.

Third: “ISO/DIS 28560-3, RFID in librairies– Part 3: Fixed length encoding.” Part 3 specifies how to encode a subset of data elements (taken from the total set of data elements described in part 1) in a straightforward way in a basic block on the RFID tag.

Cindy notes: “This may be your last opportunity to make substantive comments to this standard. If there is 100% approval, the standard can go directly to publication.”

Access to all three of the balloted parts is only available by applying directly to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) –please don’t forget to confirm your ALA membership, and let her know whether you want a particular part or all three. Her deadline for comment is no later than: Friday May 29, 2009. Please also copy me (metadata.maven@gmail.com) on your request.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Quoting from the information that comes with the ballot:

“First edition of the standard that merges and revises ISO 8459-1, ISO 8459-2, ISO 8459-3, ISO 8459-4 and ISO 8459-5. It specifies and describes data elements required in the interchange of data between bibliographic systems (i.e. terminal or browser to computer or computer to computer).”

Cindy adds: “This is the last ballot prior to publication. A Yes vote cannot contain any substantive comments (editorial comments are acceptable). If you have substantive comments, you should vote No.“

There’s a relatively short window for input to Cindy to provide advice for voting on this—she needs to have something in hand by Friday, Feb. 27, 2009. Those ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should apply directly to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) –please confirm to her that you are an ALA member (and copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com if you would).

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

As usual, she provides us some text to pique our interest:

‘ISO/CD 25964-1, Thesauri and interoperability…, Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval’

This is the first ballot on a new standard, Information and documentation — Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies — Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval.

This standard is a revision and merger of the two existing standards for monolingual (ISO 2788) and multilingual (ISO 5964) thesauri. The new standard is planned to be issued in two parts. This ballot is for Part 1, which covers the development and maintenance of thesauri, both monolingual and multilingual, including formats and protocols for data exchange. Part 2 is still in development; it will deal with interoperability between different thesauri and with other types of structured vocabulary.

The referenced standard is included with the ballot in two files. The first file is the body of the standard. The second file is the informative annexes. Note that the annexes contain examples from other documents which may be copyrighted and copyright permission has not yet been obtained for the final publication. Therefore, please do no disseminate this annex beyond the voting membership.

Also as usual, ALA may distribute copies of these documents (to ALA members only) for the purpose of review and comment related to the preparation of the U.S. position. Those interested in reviewing the documents should apply directly to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (confirming their ALA membership with their request).

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote “yes” on the ballot.

Update 1/19/09: Oops, forgot to include the deadline, it’s March 6, 2009. [dih]

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The text of this new ballot sent to NISO voting members is as follows:

“This is the third group of standards due for five-year reviews for which NISO will be issuing ballots. In accordance with NISO procedures, we are offering you the option of joining the voting pool for two of those standards that are under the responsibility of the Content and Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee.”

[Full disclosure: I'm a member of the NISO Content and Collection Management Topic Committee.]

Joining the voting pool allows ALA 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. NISO needs at least 15% of the voting membership to join the pool. If less than 15% express interest in the standard, it may be considered by the Board for administrative withdrawal.

The two standards in this voting pool ballot are:

ANSI/NISO Z39.2 – 1994 (R2001), Information Interchange Format
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-2-1994R2001/

ANSI/NISO Z39.47 – 1993 (R2003), Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use (ANSEL)
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-47-1993r2003/

Since these are both important seminal standards for libraries, ALA will opt in to the pools unless a compelling case is presented to Cindy by Dec. 18, 2008 (the ballot closes Christmas week).

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The introduction in the standard reads as follows:

“In 2006, the DCMI Usage Board undertook an editorial review of terms in the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) in order to clarify intended semantics and bring the wording of their definitions and usage comments into line with the language of the DCMI Abstract Model [DCAM]. A set of proposed changes was posted for public comment from August 28 to September 25, 2006. A face-to-face Usage Board meeting in Manzanillo, Mexico, on September 30, 2006, resulted in the publication on December 18, 2006, of a decision text, a response to comments, and revised terms documentation. This revision of the original ANSI/NISO Z39.85 standard that was issued in 2001 corresponds to version 1.1 of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative website that resulted from the editorial review and public comment period described above. All changes made to terms of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set since 2001 have been reviewed by a DCMI Usage Board in the context of the DCMI Namespace Policy. The namespace policy describes how DCMI terms are assigned Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and sets limits on the range of editorial changes that may be made to the labels, definitions and usage comments associated with existing DCMI terms.”

The announcement indicates:

“At the TC46/SC4 Stockholm meeting, it was resolved that a revision to ISO 15386, The Dublin Core metadata element set, would be released for a fast track revision, to ensure consistency with ANSI/NISO Z39.85:2007. Accordingly, this revision is being balloted immediately at the Final Draft International Standard stage. This is the first and most likely only ballot we will receive on this standard’s revision.”

[Full disclosure, I was a member of the DC Usage Board through DC-2008 in Sept. and participated in the revisions noted above.]

Cindy reminds us that feedback to NISO can include ballot options of Yes, No or Abstain, but that anything but Yes requires comment. ALA is, as usual, not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard.

In this case, though the usual drill is to contact Cindy directly for a copy of the standard, all the changes are reflected on the DCMI website (http://dublincore.org/documents/dces). If you want access to the revision document provided by ISO, you can apply directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (I’d appreciate it if you would copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com on your request so I can track responses to these announcements).

The deadline for input to Cindy is no later than: Friday, Dec. 12, 2008.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

According to the scope note in the standard:

“This International Standard contains a set of 15 bibliographic control characters for use in cataloguing rules, filing rules and indexing rules of the countries and language groups of the bibliographic community. The bibliographic control character set is an extension of the basic control character set defined by IS0 646 (IS0 escape sequence ESC 2/l 4/O). This International Standard consists of a code table and a legend specifying each bibliographic control character and indicating its code position. In addition, it includes explanatory notes, in which the functional characteristics of the individual control characters are described in detail. This bibliographic control character set is primarily intended for the interchange of bibliographic information.”

This is another of those situations where ALA advises NISO, and NISO votes. Those wishing to review this standard with an eye to providing feedback to Cindy should apply to her directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (I’d appreciate it if you would copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com on your request so I can track responses to these announcements).

Cindy also reminds us that in the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm ‘ISO 6630:1986, Bibliographic control characters’ (with comments, if any).

The deadline for input to Cindy is no later than: Monday, Feb. 23, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The scope note in the new standard reads as follows:

“The purpose of this International Standard is to establish the specifications for the International Standard Collection Identifier (ISCI) as a unique international identification system for each collection and fond and part(s) of collections and fonds. It specifies the structure of an identifier, and promotes the use of the identifier with regard to pre-existing systems.

Any issues related to the description of collections and fonds in general–such as defining a collection or fond, or describing relations between collections and subcollections–are dealt with in NISO standard Z39.91-200X (Collection description specification) and related documents. Each identified collection or fond must however be described as defined in clause 5. Recommended metadata elements are listed in annex B. The ISCI is intended for use by information related organisations such as libraries, museums and archives.”

Cindy reminds us that ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will consider ALA’s feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote. As is generally the case, Cindy can provide review copies of the standard to ALA members. To obtain a review copy, apply directly to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (I’d appreciate it if you would copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com on your request so I can track responses to these announcements).

The deadline for input to Cindy is no later than: Monday, Dec. 22, 2008.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The scope note for the standard states:

“This International Standard specifies display requirements for holdings Statements at the summary level for serial and non-serial items, to promote consistency in the communication and exchange of holdings information. It is intended for use in reporting holdings when reporting is in display form. For machine-readable reporting not in display form, the data elements specified in this International Standard should be included, although their order, etc., may be different in the machine record.

This International Standard identifies and defines the data elements for Statements of holdings of serial and nonserial items at a summary level appropriate for listings of holdings in one or more libraries or institutions. It specifies the content and sequence of data elements within data areas and requirements for inclusion of data areas in the
holdings Statement.

This International Standard requires that the holdings Statement be linked to an identification of the item to which the statement pertains; however, the method of identifying the item is excluded from this International Standard.

This International Standard applies to holdings Statements for bibliographic items in any physical medium.

This International Standard does not specify the way in which the data elements should be represented in a machine-readable data format, nor the medium (media) employed for storage, display, or transfer of the holdings Statements. The guidelines are independent of cataloguing rule Systems.”

As is usual with ISO standards which are not openly available, ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should apply directly to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu and verify their membership in ALA. I ask that those requesting a copy of the standard from Cindy copy me on their request (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so that I can keep track of how these notices are used.

Cindy’s deadline for comments is Monday Feb. 23, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The scope note in the draft standard reads as follows: “This International Standard makes recommendations for the preparation of references and citations in Latin scripts in works that are not themselves primarily bibliographical. It applies to references and citations to all kinds of information resource, such as monographs, serials, contributions, patents, cartographic materials, electronic information resources (including computer software and data bases), music, recorded sound, prints, photographs, graphic and audiovisual works, and moving images. It does not apply to machine-parsable citations. This document does not prescribe a particular style of reference or citation. The examples used in this document are not prescriptive as to style and punctuation. Annex A and B indicate the relevant clause(s) of this International Standard.”

This opportunity may be your last to make substantive comments to this standard. If there is 100% approval, the standard can go directly to publication. As usual in these cases, ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather providing feedback to NISO concerning their vote. As this standard is very much within the library realm, ALA member comments will likely carry some weight.

Cindy notes that permission is granted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to electronically reproduce this draft International Standard for purpose of review and comment related to the preparation of the U.S. position, provided this notice is included. All other rights are reserved. ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should apply directly to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu and verify their membership in ALA. I ask that those requesting a copy of the standard from Cindy copy me on their request (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so that I can keep track of how these notices are used.

Cindy’s deadline for comments is Monday Feb. 23, 2009.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Group 2: Formation of Voting Pools for CCM Standard Reaffirmations
This is the second group of standards due for five-year reviews for which NISO will be issuing ballots. In accordance with NISO procedures, we are offering you the option of joining the voting pool for five standards that are under the responsibility of the Content and Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee.

This is NOT the reaffirmation ballot — the current ballot is only to form the voting pools.

ALA may choose any or all of the standards listed below. Joining the voting pool will allow ALA to vote on the standard and to provide comments. Once the voting pools have been formed, separate ballots for each standard will be issued only to those voting members who have joined the pool. If we do not join the voting pool for a particular standard, we have in essence “abstained” from any decision made regarding this standard’s reaffirmation ballot.

NISO needs at least 15% of the voting membership to join the pool. If less than 15% express interest in the standard, it may be considered by the Board for administrative withdrawal.

The five standards in this voting pool ballot and the URLs for you to view them are:

1) ANSI/NISO Z39.48 – 1992 (R2002), Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives

http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-48-1992r2002/

2) ANSI/NISO Z39.56 – 1996 (R2002), Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI)

http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-56-1996r2002/

3) ANSI/NISO Z39.62 – 2000, Eye-legible Information on Microfilm Leaders and Trailers and on Containers of Processed Microfilm on Open Reels

http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-62-2000/

4) ANSI/NISO Z39.73 – 1994 (R2001), Single-Tier Steel Bracket Library Shelving

http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-73-1994R2001/

5) ANSI/NISO Z39.41 – 1997 (R2002), Printed Information on Spines

http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-41-1997r2002/

The ballot to select which voting pools ALA should opt into closes Wednesday, 3 December 2008. I need to vote no later than Nov. 26, so your deadline for feedback to me is Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008.

Because ALA is such a diverse organization with so many interests, even though some may be more relevant than others, unless I am presented a compelling case not to opt into one or more of these voting pools, I plan to opt into them all.

Cindy’s email is: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. I’d appreciate it if any of you offering comments could copy me (metadata.maven@gmail.com) on those comments, so that I can keep track of LITA efforts in this area.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The text of this ballot is as follows:
‘Group 1: Formation of Voting Pools for CCM Standard Reaffirmations’
NISO periodically issues ballots for a number of NISO standards that are due for five-year reviews. In accordance with NISO procedures, they are offering voting members the option of joining the voting pool for five of those standards, that are under the responsibility of the Content and Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee. [Full disclosure: I’m a member of the CCM Topic Committee--Diane].

This is NOT the reaffirmation ballot — the current ballot is only to form the voting pools.

ALA may choose any or all of the standards listed below. Joining the voting pool will allow ALA to vote on the standard and to provide comments. Once the voting pools have been formed, separate ballots for each standard will be issued only to those voting members who have joined the pool. If we do not join the voting pool for a particular standard, we have in essence “abstained” from any decision made regarding this standard’s reaffirmation ballot.

NISO needs at least 15% of the voting membership to join the pool. If less than 15% express interest in the standard, it may be considered by the Board for administrative withdrawal.

The five standards in this voting pool ballot and the URLs for you to view them are:

1) ANSI/NISO/ISO 12083 – 1995 (R2002), Electronic Manuscript Preparation and Markup [This is an adoption of the ISO standard.]

2)ANSI/NISO Z39.14 – 1997 (R2002), Guidelines for Abstracts

3)ANSI/NISO Z39.23 – 1997 (R2002), Standard Technical Report Number Format and Creation

4)ANSI/NISO Z39.26 – 1997 (R2002), Micropublishing Product Information

5)ANSI/NISO Z39.32 – 1996 (R2002), Information on Microfiche Headers

—
The ballot to select which voting pools ALA should opt into closes Sunday, 30 November 2008. I need to vote no later than Nov. 26, so your deadline for feedback to me is Monday, Nov. 17, 2008.

Because ALA is such a diverse organization with so many interests, even though some may be more relevant than others, unless I am presented a compelling case not to opt into one or more of these voting pools, I plan to opt into them all.

Cindy’s email is: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. I’d appreciate it if any of you offering comments could copy me (metadata.maven@gmail.com) on those comments, so that I can keep track of LITA efforts in this area.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The scope statement in the standard states:

‘This International Standard specifies a framework designed to provide guidance on the basic principles for representing data recorded in terminological data collections. This framework includes a meta-model and methods for describing specific terminological markup languages (TMLs) expressed in XML. The mechanisms for implementing constraints in a TML are defined in this International Standard, but not the specific constraints for individual TMLs, except for the three TMLs defined in Annexes B to D.”

“This International Standard is designed to support the development and use of computer applications for terminological data and the exchange of such data between different applications. It does not standardize data categories and methods for the specification of data structures which are specified in ISO 12620 and other related International Standards. This International Standard also defines the conditions that allow the data expressed in one TML to be mapped onto another TML and specifies a generic mapping tool (GMT) for this purpose (see Annex A).”

Deadline for comment on this ballot is December 2, 2008.

The second item is a new work item proposal: Revision of ISO/TS 17369. Cindy notes that this is a proposal from a liaison committee (TC 154, Processes, data elements and documents in commerce, industry and administration) to revise the standard, ISO/TS 17369: 2005 Statistical data and metadata exchange (SDMX).

From the scope of proposed project:

“Revision to extend technical specification to include services-oriented exchange architecture and more complete metadata functionality and to convert the document into an International Standards (IS). This revision builds on the existing TS 17369 and implementations associated with changes proposed for Version 2 in November 2005 via http://www.sdmx.org. A disposition log of public comments has been maintained.

Purpose and justification: Revisions reflect need for features to support more efficient and effective data and metadata exchange.”

Additionally, Cindy notes that since this is a new work project, if ALA votes “Yes,” she may identify one or more US experts to work on the standard’s development. “If you nominate someone please provide not just a name but contact information (most especially phone number and e-mail address).”

Deadline for recommendations on this item is November 24, 2008.

As with all ISO documents, access to both items is restricted. If you are an ALA member and wish to see either item, please contact Cindy directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu and confirm that you are an ALA member. For the second item, in addition to the proposal, a working draft of the document was submitted. Cindy notes that it is included in zip files (about a dozen of them) as the various sections have not yet been combined into a single document.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

From Cindy’s mail: “The scope note in the draft standard reads as follows: “This International Standard provides guidelines concerning constraints related to the implementation of a Data Category Registry (DCR) applicable to all types of language resources, e.g., terminological, lexicographical, corpus-based, machine translation, etc. It specifies mechanisms for creating, selecting and maintaining data categories, as well as an interchange format for representing them.”

She further notes: “This is a ballot from TC37 / SC3 (Terminology and other language and content resources / Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content). Since TC46 / SC9 has a liaison with this committee, NISO can send in vote recommendations and comments. Ballot options are Yes, No or Abstain. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider ALA’s feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.”

ALA members who are interested in reviewing the standard must obtain it via Cindy. She can be contacted by email at: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu. Please copy me on your request (metadata.maven@gmail.com) so I can track activity emanating from the blog.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

This is not a NISO standard, but one that is being balloted by ISO. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether it should recommend approval or disapproval to AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management). NISO will review and consider the feedback that it receives prior to submitting the US vote. Our voting options are: Confirm, Revise/Amend, Withdraw or Abstain. Voter comments are optional for this ballot. Deadline for vote recommendations and comments to Cindy is Nov. 19, 2008.

ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should apply to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) directly for a copy of the document (please confirm to her that you’re an ALA member, and copy me on the request, please: metadata.maven@gmail.com).

I hope that we will see some strong interest on the part of LITA members to review and comment on the standards routed to us for our opinion. Though it sometimes seems that there are far too many layers between individual members and the standards bodies, I know from experience that well considered comments can have an enormous impact on the process. Please consider participating!

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Cindy Hepfer, ALA Voting Representative to NISO, adds some illustrative brief excerpts from the (copyrighted) introduction:

“Increasingly, information that has been created, captured and stored electronically is used as evidence of business activities. Such evidence might be required in contract discussions, or in courts of law. This Technical Report defines recommended practices for electronic storage of business or other information in image form. As such, complying with its recommendations is of value to organizations even when the trustworthiness of the stored information is not being challenged …”

Cindy reminds us that this is not a NISO standard, but one that is being balloted by ISO. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether it should recommend approval or disapproval to AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management). NISO will review and consider the feedback that it receives prior to submitting the US vote. Our voting options are: Yes, No or Abstain. No or Abstain votes require comments (explanations). Cindy needs vote recommendations and comments by Sept. 17, 2008.

ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should apply to Cindy (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) directly for a copy of the document (please confirm to her that you’re an ALA member, and copy me on the request, please: metadata.maven@gmail.com).

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Cindy Hepfer, ALA Voting Representative to NISO, reminds us that our vote options are: Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm. As usual, ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider the feedback that it receives prior to submitting the US vote.

ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should apply directly to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please confirm to her that you’re an ALA member, and copy me on the request, please: metadata.maven@gmail.com). Cindy’s deadline for input is no later than: Nov. 26, 2008.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Cindy reminds us that our vote options are: Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard.

ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should apply directly to Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please confirm to her that you’re an ALA member, and copy me on the request, please: metadata.maven@gmail.com). Deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than: Nov. 21, 2008.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

The summary from the announcement states: “This proposed standard will outline the program components, planning issues, recordkeeping requirements, and procedures for the conversion and migration of digital records so as to preserve the integrity of such records as evidence of business transactions. This standard is intended only for use in the conversion and migration of data that is to be preserved as digital records. This document does not address procedures for the digitization of records held in paper form.”

The purpose and justification provided in the work item proposal follows. “This proposed standard provides guidance in understanding recordkeeping requirements, the organizational and business framework for conducting the conversion and migration process, technology planning issues, and monitoring/controls for the process. It identifies the steps, components, and particular methodologies for the conversion and migration of records from one recordkeeping system to another — covering such topics as workflow, testing, version control, and validation.”

Cindy also points out: “Since this is a new work project, if we vote ‘Yes,’ we may identify one or more US experts to work on the standard’s development. If you nominate someone please provide not just a name but contact information (most especially phone number and e-mail address).”

As with all ISO documents, access to this one is restricted. If you are an ALA member and wish to see this ISO document, please contact Cindy directly (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) and confirm that you are an ALA member (I’d appreciate being copied on requests, at metadata.maven@gmail.com). Specific comments on the working draft are encouraged but are not required in order for Cindy to vote YES.
Vote recommendations and comments on the work item ballot, and any nominations of experts, are due to Cindy no later than Oct. 10, 2008. In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to approve the work item regarding the digital records conversion and migration process.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Cindy Hepfer, ALA Voting representative to NISO, reports to us on a proposed new work item for a standard on Electronic archiving — Specifications concerning the design and the operation of an information system for electronic records preservation. The proposal includes a matrix placing this proposed standard in context with other existing standards and projects, including the TC46 project: ISO/PDTR 26102, Records management — Requirements for long term preservation of electronic records.

Cindy says, “Recommending a “Yes” vote indicates you are in favor of the project. A “No” vote means you think the project should not be pursued. Comments are required for a No vote. While we are not required to nominate an expert for this working group (if the project is approved), we have the option of doing so. If anyone wants to work on this project, please provide the name and contact information in your comments.”

“Please understand that this is not a NISO standard, but is being balloted by ISO’s TC46. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider the feedback that it receives prior to submitting the US vote.”

The scope note in the proposal document is as follows: “This standard applies to records produced by any kind of information systems, office automation software or converted from physical or analogical form. It describes the design and operation of an information management system which store electronically records where integrity, accessibility and trustworthiness is a main concern including legal, business, governmental, public interest, and other purposes.”

“Records may contain any type of data, including digital born or image information, digital audio or video. This standard is for use with any type of electronic storage medium including logical or physical Worm and rewritable based systems.”

More specifically, this standard gives specifications for:

- bodies or companies which wish to implement information systems in which they will be able to store document imaging or digital born documents so as to ensure their conformity and integrity compared with the original documents;

- service companies which are involved in development and integration of electronic records management systems (ERMS);

- companies which design software and/or hardware sub-systems that will be integrated in end-user systems.

This standard does not cover the processes used to evaluate the authenticity of information, to select the records and to organize the repository prior to capture, import or store it into the system.”

As with all ISO documents, access to this one is restricted. If you are an ALA member and wish to see this ISO document, please contact Cindy directly (HSLcindy@buffalo.edu) and confirm that you are an ALA member (I’d appreciate being copied on requests, at metadata.maven@gmail.com).

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

According to the announcement Cindy forwarded, “This International Standard addresses publishers and book manufacturers. It also addresses acquisition librarians and archivists with a view to informing library and archival staff about the good physical properties they should expect in the books they acquire for public use.”

As is generally the case with ISO reviews, ALA members willing to review this document should apply to Cindy directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu for an electronic copy of the standard (I’d appreciate it if you copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com as well). Our vote options are Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm. In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm ‘ISO 11800, Book binding materials and methods’ (with comments, if any).

Cindy asks that comments be forwarded to her by Nov. 27, 2008.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

This call is for ISO 11799:2003, Document storage requirements for archive and library materials, undergoing a systematic review. Our vote options are Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm.
According to the introduction in the standard: “This International Standard applies to the long-term storage of archive and library materials, but takes into account that, as the materials are stored to allow current use as well, some compromise with the ideal conditions for long-term storage may be unavoidable.”

As is usual in these ISO reviews, ALA members should contact Cindy directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu if they would like to review the standard in response to this call (I’d appreciate being copied, if you’re responding as a result of this post).

Comments are due to Cindy by Nov. 25, 2008.

The formal name of the published standard is ISO 233-2:1993, Information and documentation – Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters – Part 2: Arabic language – Simplified transliteration.

According to the Scope statement in the standard: “This part of IS0 233 establishes a simplified system for the transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters. This simplification of the stringent rules established by IS0 233:1984 is especially intended to facilitate the processing of bibliographic information (e.g. catalogues, indices, citations, etc.).”

As is usually the case with these ballots, ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. Our vote options are Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.

Because we cannot provide links to ISO documents directly, those ALA members desiring to review the standards for the purposes of advising ALA should contact Cindy directly at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (I’d appreciate being copied, if you’re responding as a result of this post). In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm ‘ISO 233: 1883′ (with comments, if any).

Comments are due to Cindy by Nov. 24, 2008.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

A systematic review ballot of the published standard, ISO 2108:2005, Information and documentation — International Standard Book Number (ISBN), has been presented to TC46 Ballot Advisory Group. This is an opportunity for ALA to provide feedback on the 13-digit ISBN. ALA’s vote options are Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw, or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm. The final deadline for Cindy to vote is Friday, Aug. 29, 2008, and she asks that responses be sent to her at least one week in advanced of this final deadline.

Cindy reminds us that ALA is a voting member of NISO, and NISO is the official U.S. voting member for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 46 on Information and Documentation. Please understand that this is not a NISO standard, but is being balloted by ISO’s TC46. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.

NOTE: Permission is granted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to electronically reproduce this draft International Standard for purpose of review and comment related to the preparation of the U.S. position, provided this notice is included. All other rights are reserved. Since the document is in a password protected area of the NISO website, Cindy cannot direct ALA members who are interested in reviewing the standard to it directly. However, ALA members interested in reviewing the standard should contact Cindy directly for a copy for review purposes.

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm ‘ISO 2108:2005 (ISBN) Systematic Review’ (with comments, if any).

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

“A new ballot has been presented to TC46 Ballot Advisory Group: ‘ISO/DIS 28500, WARC file format’. This is a new standard at the Draft International Standard (DIS) stage, and this may be the last chance to provide substantive comments to this standard. If all member bodies vote Yes, this standard can proceed directly to publication.”

NISO’s Summary: The WARC (Web ARChive) file format offers a convention for concatenating multiple resource records (data objects), each consisting of a set of simple text headers and an arbitrary data block into one long file. The WARC format is an extension of the ARC File Format [ARC] that has traditionally been used to store “web crawls” as sequences of content blocks harvested from the World Wide Web. The WARC format is expected to be a standard way to structure, manage and store billions of resources collected from the web and elsewhere. It will be used to build applications for harvesting (such as the open source Heritrix web crawler), managing, access, and exchanging content.

ALA’s vote options are Yes, No, or Abstain. Comments are required for all votes other than Yes. As a result, in the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm ‘ISO/DIS 28500, WARC file format’. The final deadline for ALA to vote is Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, and Cindy asks that you respond to her at least one week in advanced of this final deadline (which is Wed., Sept. 11).

Cindy also notes that this is not a NISO standard, but is being balloted by ISO’s TC46. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote. Cindy can provide copies of this draft to ALA members who wish to review it–please contact her directly for a review copy.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

“A new ballot has been presented to TC46 Ballot Advisory Group: ‘ISO 2108:2005 (ISBN) Systematic Review’. This is a systematic review ballot of the published standard, ISO 2108:2005, Information and documentation — International Standard Book Number (ISBN). ISO now requires the first systematic review of a standard to take place three years after publication; subsequent reviews will be every five years. This is an opportunity for ALA members to provide feedback on the 13-digit ISBN. ALA’s vote options are Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw, or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm.”

The final deadline for Cindy to vote is Friday, Aug. 29, 2008, and she asks that reviewers respond to her at least one week in advance of this final deadline (Aug. 22 for the math impaired). As is often the case, ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.

ALA members can obtain a copy of the draft from Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu.

Diane Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator

Cindy needs responses for this standard by Friday, May 30.

NISO Summary: This Technical Specification is part of the ISO 23081 series on metadata for records. It focuses on the framework for defining metadata elements for managing records and provides a generic statement of metadata elements, whether these are physical, analogue or digital, consistent with the principles of ISO 23081-1:2006.

[Note: Cindy points out that ISO 23081-1:2006 can be purchased from the order area of the ISO website: Part 1 can be purchased in English for CHF 96,00. ]

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to approve ISO/DIS 23081-2. Those desiring to review the drafts should contact either Cindy Hepfer (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) or me (dih1@cornell.edu) — please indicate whether you’re an ALA member! Interested reviewers from countries other than the U.S. should contact their national standards body about the procedure for submitting votes on ISO TC46 standards.

1. ISO/DIS 16245, Information and documentation — Boxes, file covers and other enclosures, made from cellulosic materials, for storage of paper and parchment documents. This is an ISO Committee Draft up for a vote, and Cindy needs any responses for this standard by Monday, June 2.

2. ISO/FDIS 9707, Information and documentation — Statistics on the production and distribution of books, newspapers, periodicals and electronic publications. This is another ISO Committee Draft up for a vote, and Cindy asks that any responses for this standard be sent to her by March 4.

3. ISO/DTR 28118, Information and documentation — Performance indicators for national libraries. This ISO Committee Draft needs comments back to Cindy by April 15.

As always, those desiring to review the drafts should contact either Cindy Hepfer (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) or me (dih1@cornell.edu) — please indicate whether you’re an ALA member! Interested reviewers from countries other than the U.S. should contact their national standards body about the procedure for submitting votes on ISO standards.

Cindy needs comments and vote recommendations by April 7.

Information provided about this standard by NISO:
=======
Summary: Provides guidance for establishing bibliographic references and citations to works that are primarily in Latin scripts. It applies to information resources such as monograph and serial publications, contributions within publications, patents, maps and similar cartographic materials, music, sound recordings, prints, photographs and other graphic works, and audiovisual material, regardless of the format (e.g. analogue or digital) in which such resources are issued. This revision combines the two parts of the previous standard.
========

A reminder:
ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote. ALA can only provide ISO protected documents to ALA members, so please contact either Cindy (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) or me (dih1@cornell.edu) and let us know that you are an ALA member.

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to approve ISO/CD 690, Information and documentation — Guidelines for bibliographic references and citations to information resources, with comments (if any).

Comments and vote recommendations from NISO members are due to NISO by March 7, 2008, but Cindy asks that any responses for this standard by be sent by March 4.

Information provided about this standard by NISO:
=======
Note: This is the final ballot stage prior to publication. Yes votes can only contain editorial (non-substantive) comments.

Summary: This standard aims at giving guidance to the international publishing community on the keeping of publishing statistics. This revision primarily focuses on integrating the economic and technological changes in the media sector, and especially in the publishing industry. The scope has been enlarged to cover statistics on the production of electronic publications.
========

ALA is a voting member of NISO, and NISO is the official U.S. voting member for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 46 on Information and Documentation. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote. ALA can only provide ISO protected documents to ALA members, so please contact either Cindy (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) or me (dih1@cornell.edu) and let us know that you are an ALA member.

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to approve ISO/FDIS 9707, Information and documentation — Statistics on the production and distribution of books, newspapers, periodicals and electronic publications, with comments (if any).

These have as usual been forwarded from Cindy Hepfer, ALA Representative to NISO. This one is concerning an ISO Committee Draft of an International Standard issued for ballot: ISO NWI, Document management — Guidelines for the creation of a metadata crosswalk. Comments and vote recommendations from NISO members are due to NISO by Feb. 15, 2008, but as Cindy has three NISO voting deadlines on the 15th, she needs any responses for this standard by Feb. 11.

Information provided about this standard by NISO:
=======
Note: This ballot is from TC171 on Document management and is for a proposed new technical report. Since TC46/SC11 is a liaison, we have the opportunity to make a recommendation on the project and submit comments. The U.S. vote will be submitted by AIIM, the TAG for TC171.

Summary: A generalized crosswalk is needed between the metadata schemas in common usage in document management applications. This document will provide document management participants with a method and a guideline on how to design, build, and implement a metadata crosswalk. The implementation of the crosswalk will not only include document management schemas but also other applications generating digital files.
========

A reminder:
ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote. ALA can only provide ISO protected documents to ALA members, so please contact either Cindy (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) or me (dih1@cornell.edu) and let us know that you are an ALA member.

ISO/DIS 10957, Information and documentation — International standard music number (ISMN)

Summary:

The International Standard Music Number (ISMN) was developed by and for the music publishing sector as a separate system to complement the International Standard Book Number (ISBN). The existence of the ISMN as a separate identifier system makes it possible to identify printed and notated music as a distinct category of publication within the global supply chain and to develop trade directories and similar services for the specialized market for music publications.

Comments and vote recommendations from NISO members are due to NISO by April 30, 2008.

Those desiring to review the drafts should contact either Cindy Hepfer (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) or me (dih1@cornell.edu) — please indicate whether you’re an ALA member! Interested reviewers from countries other than the U.S. should contact their national standards body about the procedure for submitting votes on ISO TC46 standards.

ISO/CD 28560-1, Information and documentation — Data model for use of RFID in libraries — Part 1: General requirements and data elements

Summary:

Establishes an abstract model for the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags for library items. The model is appropriate for all types of libraries. The data model specifies general requirements and a set of data elements to meet the needs for: circulation of library items; acquisition of library items; inter-library loan processes; data requirements of publishers; printers and other suppliers of library items; and details of borrowers, including membership cards.

ISO/CD 28560-2, Information and documentation — RFID in libraries — Part 2: Encoding based on ISO/IEC 15962

Summary:

This part deals with the encoding rules based on ISO/IEC 15962 (RFID for item management — Data protocol), which uses an object identifier structure to identify data elements. This enables the optional data elements defined in Part 1 to be selected or not, even to the extent that the RFID tags on different items in the same library may carry different data elements.

ISO/CD 28560-3, Information and documentation — RFID in libraries — Part 3: Fixed length encoding

Summary:

This part is applicable to RFID applications for libraries that use the RFID tags conforming to ISO/IEC 18000-3 mode 1 (RFID for item management — Part 3: Parameters for air interface communications at 13,56 MHz). This part defines a basic subset of data elements taken from the total set of data elements described in part 1. It is specified how to encode the basic set of data elements in a straightforward way in a basic block on the RFID tag.

Note that NISO has a recently issued Recommended Practice (RP): RFID in US Libraries (NISO RP-6-2008), which is freely available from the NISO website (http://www.niso.org/standards/resources/RP-6-2008.pdf). The NISO Working Group was in close contact with the international group that developed the above standard in an effort to keep the two documents in synch as much as possible.

Comments and vote recommendations from NISO members are due to NISO by March 6, 2008. This is the first ballot (Committee Draft) for the standard and thus your best opportunity to have any desired changes incorporated. Those desiring to review the drafts should contact either Cindy Hepfer (hslcindy@buffalo.edu) or me (dih1@cornell.edu) — please indicate whether you’re an ALA member! Interested reviewers from countries other than the U.S. should contact their national standards body about the procedure for submitting votes on ISO TC46 standards.

The other kind of issue that comes up is the formation of new working groups to study particular issues and make standards recommendations. These are pretty important, and LITA members should be paying some attention to these, as they’ll most likely come up with recommendations that could affect our working lives.

Cindy Hepfer, who is the current ALA rep to NISO, has forwarded to us two new groups in the process of formation.

NISO will require a yea or nay from ALA on these soon, and absent objections from the membership, Cindy will vote yea. (Yes, the timing is tight, but thus is always the case around holidays, and these kinds of proposals are only available for vote for 30 days by NISO procedures.) Her deadline for comment on these is Jan. 17.

D2D-01 UKSG Knowledge Base Working Group

“This is a proposal to form a joint NISO/UKSG working group, comprising representatives from each of the parties active in the supply and use of knowledge bases, to develop guidelines for best practices to effect smoother interaction between members of the knowledge base supply chain.”

BUS-01 Institutional Identifiers

“This is a proposal to develop a standard for Institutional Identification in the publishing and library environment.”

Cindy notes: “The documentation for each of these working groups is minimal, but now that I can access them I am more than willing to forward one or both to anyone who is interested, as long as you contact me no later than noon next Wednesday (1/9). I will be at Midwinter 1/10-1/15.” Cindy can be contacted at: HSLcindy@buffalo.edu.

The agenda includes two topics:

1) A Standards Update by NISO Managing Director Todd Carpenter

2) Beyond the IP address: Shibboleth and electronic resources by Holly Eggleston, Assistant Department Head, Acquisitions, University of California – San Diego

For further information about the IG, contact:
Éva Bolkovac
Chair, Standards IG
eva.bolkovac@yale.edu

RFID Interest Group will meet on:
Saturday, January 12th, 1:30-3:30 pm at the MARRIOT, Salon B

1) RFID Tag Quality and Emerging Standards by leading RFID Scientists Paul Sevcik and Roger Larson

“Is one RFID tag the same as another RFID tag? Absolutely not! And standard, accepted accelerated aging testing proves this. Some tags will fail over time – how does this impact your system? What are the emerging RFID tag standards, why are they important, and what will they provide for your library? What can systems provide to allow for changing standards? Come learn about the latest about RFID tag quality and emerging RFID standards.”

2) RFID Standards Update by NISO RFID Standards Working Group Chair Vinod Chachra

“What standard is NISO going to recommend in the U.S? Will it be the Danish Standard? Please come and learn what the RFID Standard recommendation will be for the U.S.”

For more information, contact:
Jacob Haas
RFID Interest Group Chair
jhaas@mmm.com

From the summary provided:

“Digital records have a number of fundamental differences from traditional records; hence need special treatment to preserve their integrity as records over time. Of immediate concern to all organisations is the ability to retain and preserve those digital records so that their authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability over time are not compromised. This Technical Report provides additional guidance to ISO 15489 specific to managing digital records for as long as they are required. It identifies and addresses the management issues within the limits of technological environments. This Technical Report relies on the concepts set out in ISO 15489 and needs to be applied in conjunction with that standard. This Technical Report is related to document based records, and not to records held in the form of databases.”

As a reminder, ALA is a voting member of NISO, and NISO is the official U.S. voting member for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 46 on Information and Documentation. ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. NISO will review and consider this feedback prior to submitting the U.S. vote.

As is unfortunately customary with ISO, you can’t look at the document directly, but have to request it from Cindy Hepfer or me. Cindy can be contacted directly at HSLcindy@buffalo, and I can contacted at dih1@cornell.edu. (I’d be grateful if you’d copy me on a request to Cindy, so I can be aware of ALA member interest). Cindy requests that comments be sent to her no later than Feb. 13.

Here’s the summary:

“This International Standard specifies and describes data elements required in the interchange of data between bibliographic systems. It describes, in the form of a directory, data elements used to support the processes of acquisition, resource description and cataloguing, searching, requesting loan or copy directly to an end user or inter-library. The focus of the standard is to provide common definitions for data elements that are exchanged in protocol messages between systems and is also intended as a foundation for new standards. By inheriting element names and definitions, new standards can be achieved in an efficient way that directly relates them with existing standards in the field.”

This is a revision and consolidation of the previous version issued in 5 parts between 1988 and 2002.

Comments and vote recommendations from NISO members are due to NISO by Wednesday, March 19, 2008. Because ALA is a NISO member, we have the opportunity to take a look at this and funnel comments to our ALA representative to NISO (Cindy Hepfer, hslcindy@buffalo.edu). As I’ve mentioned before, I can’t send you directly to this document–ISO is very closed to this sort of thing. However, if you’re interested in reviewing it, you can send me (dih1@cornell.edu) or Cindy a note and ask us to send you the document. Let us know that you’re an ALA member (we’re not supposed to distribute to non-members).

I did a small informal poll of bib-savvy colleagues and none of them had heard of this standard. Have you? Do you know of any applications that use it?

One such hiccup surfaced this past week, when I got a query from a LITA member about voting on a new version of ISO/FDIS 2709, which is the international standard that corresponds to NISO Z39.2, the underlying standard for MARC. I checked my email, and I hadn’t gotten any messages about this, so asked the member to forward the notification (I’m also checking with Cindy to see whether she’d gotten anything about it). The comment and recommendation period ends on December 12–a pretty tight timeframe.

To a certain extent, though it’s a bit worrying that there seems to have been something of a breakdown in the chain of information exchange that allows us to participate at all in the process, the issue is not so much with this particular vote. From the NISO announcement:

This International Standard specifies the requirements for a generalized exchange format which will hold records describing all forms of material capable of bibliographic description as well as other types of records. This is the fourth edition of the standard and revises the 1996 version. The changes in this revision clarify the use of Unicode with UTF-8 encoding. Prior to this revision, it was equivalent to the NISO standard, Z39.2, Information Interchange Format. NISO has been waiting for this international revision to be completed before reviewing/revising its own standard. This information exchange format standard is considered one of the “critical” standards for library systems.

So, while it’s certainly worth taking a look at what’s going on with this standard from the ISO side, clearly we’ll have another crack at it when NISO attempts to reconcile Z39.2 with the ISO standard, and we can all hope that there’s not disagreement with what ISO has come up with. But I can’t tell, nor can most of you, since getting access to the updated standard coming up for ballot is not simple.

For those of us in the U.S., NISO is where we go to look for important standards, particularly for libraries. Some years ago, when the Internet was taking over from the print supply chain as a basis for discovering and disseminating information of all kinds, NISO took a leap and made their standards available as PDF download, for free. This was pretty gutsy–for one thing it put them in direct competition with themselves, as they had previously depended for income on the sale of printed documents. Now, I don’t know whether or not this has worked out for them financially (they still sell printed versions, but presumably fewer than previously), but we should all be grateful to them for taking a principled risk for openness.

Such has not been the case for ISO (International Standards Organsation). Their standards are not available easily or freely. One is either a recognized part of the standard process (in which case one can securely log in and see work in progress) or one pays for the privilege of downloading a digital version or purchasing a print version of a standard. These standards are not cheap, and as a result are often more widely known about in the abstract than regularly consulted. When this kind of ‘harmonization’ happens and we only get access to the process at a second stage, when critical decisions may already have been made, there’s a basis for concern.

I’m not sure what we can do about it, except be aware and whine when possible. We should also take the opportunity to thank NISO for their willingness to take risks on behalf of an open standards process.

There is some success in this: LC is attempting to keep people involved in the process, and webcasting is a good way to do that, given the way the group operates. But having hundreds (thousands?) of librarians disappointed by the failure of the technology and perhaps discouraging them from reading the report and providing comments is not good either. I note that the webcast is all that’s offered so far as a mechanism to inform us: no slides were made available and the report is awaiting presentation to the LC staff before the rest of us get to see it. There’s nothing on the site indicating when we might expect slides or report, either. The comment period only lasts until December 15, which leaves us very little time to read, discuss, and comment.

I hope that the Library of Congress understands the strong desire of the library community to participate in this important work, and that they demonstrate that understanding by posting the full webcast, slides, and report as soon as possible.

They might also take a look at possibilities for planning future use of webcast technology that doesn’t inevitably break when they are more successful than they anticipate in provoking interest.

UPDATE: Karen Coyle has blogged the meeting based on her notes (she was there). Very interesting stuff here, and a lot to discuss!

The session was blogged by the ERIG new chair-elect, Jennifer Lang on her blog: http://jenniferlang.net/archives/67.

Unfortunately, the proposal is behind ISO’s pay-to-view firewall, which is a real impediment for those of us who’d like to look before jumping in. She sent a copy of it around with her email, so it would be available from her, or from me, if you’d like to take a look. (Betty is at: landesb@ors.od.nih.gov, and I can be found at: dih1@cornell.edu)
The proposal is at http://www.niso.org/pdfs/ISO_NP_27730ISCIandWD.pdf.

From the Introduction, the need for this standard is succinctly stated:

“ISO TC46 has developed standard identifiers for a wide variety of entities. However, a standard identifier for collections and fonds has not been built. In the past there has not been a need for such an identifier, either, but the situation has changed. There is now a large number of collections and fonds and a broad range of organisations hosting them. These collections and fonds can be physical or electronic, partly physical and partly electronic, or virtual; they can be available either on-line in the Internet or off-line.

The need for identifying collections and fonds has emerged with introduction of metasearch engines, which do – or will – include collection descriptions as a means of helping the patrons to locate relevant information. An identifier is generally seen as one of the key metadata elements of collection description; while it is possible to use local identifiers, in an environment where global exchange of this kind of metadata is anticipated, usage of local identifiers is not a good option. Local collection or fond identifiers do not enable either efficient searching or duplicate detection.

The aim of this standard is to enable a system which requires neither a large – and expensive – international centre nor large national/ regional centres, even if tens or hundreds of thousands of collections and fonds are identified.”

Betty points out that, as this is an ISO and not a NISO proposal, ALA is providing feedback to NISO, which they will consider prior to submitting the U.S. recommendation. Betty says, “If our recommendation is “yes”, NISO has asked us to indicate if we have an expert to nominate to work on the committee.”

Recommendations and comments are due to NISO by July 13, 2007. However, since Betty will no longer be the ALA NISO representative after June 30, she would really like to get this wrapped up before or right after ALA if at all possible. To that end, she asks that those with opinions send your recommendations to her by Friday, June 29. I would be happy to provide an avenue for those recommendations (and will likely make some suggestions myself). Betty mentions that in the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to approve the proposal.

One recent post of hers on standards (May 11, for those of you who want to check the archives) was so good and thought provoking I wanted to make sure more people saw it—particularly LITA people who have a strong interest in standards.

Karen starts out by quoting a previous comment by Casey Bisson:

“OpenSearch creator DeWitt Clinton spoke of it along these lines:
standards bodies are good at formalizing what’s become standard
practice. (Paraphrasing) “If people don’t already agree on what the
standard is, then no committee will solve that…it shouldn’t even go
to committee.”

And Karen came back with:

“It is absolutely the case that standards bodies do not create standards. That’s not their role, and I think they know it. Standards bodies are in the business of creating a formal agreed standard from what has become common practice (which is often sorta standard but not quite) or of reconciling competing practices, and then promoting and maintaining the standard. Ideally standards bodies would run, or manage the running of, registries and other parts of the standards infrastructure.

The other thing they do is allow folks who weren’t initially involved in the development of the standard to get their licks in. For example, the ISO puts a certain amount of effort into bringing developing countries into the standards-using community. NISO involves a community of vendors and their customers.

In the library world, standards are essentially agreements between libraries and their vendors. The vendors are great supporters of the standards process because it means that they can (supposedly) create a system based on a single data structure (like MARC) that will then be accepted by all of their customers.

The problem that we see today in the library world is that when there is a standard that is rising up to the point of being useful and usable by many in our community, it isn’t clear where to take it so that it can move from being a neat hack to being a community standard. NISO, as many have noted, takes too long to move a standard forward. LC manages standards but doesn’t have a good process for community involvement (e.g. MODS, where the only community input is a listserv). ALA apparently got out of the standards business about 20 years ago, and yet in theory would be an obvious body to promote library interests. It would be to our advantage to have a clear and smooth standards process.”

So, given this standards reality check from Karen, what are the implications for us? One might be that we’re involved in standards activities that we haven’t even identified as such—clearly most of us don’t wake up in the morning and (like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) say “Hey, lets make up a standard today,” but in fact as we do our work we tend to think about the general implications of decisions we make on behalf of our projects and libraries. There are places where we can step in and participate in the process when it’s already started (and I’ll be talking about a specific opportunity in an upcoming post), though clearly most of us don’t take up those opportunities too often, mostly because we already have busy lives and sometimes our institutions don’t support such activity very well.

But in a sense the bigger question Karen asks is in that last paragraph. Are the places we take our standards for that transition from “neat hack to being a community standard” functioning well for us? Karen notes that there are problems in many of the institutional places where we used to look for that effort (I would particularly suggest that we look closely at the differences between how MARC21 is managed as a standard and how MODS is being developed).

We’ll have an upcoming opportunity to ask one of the important movers and shakers about these issues. Todd Carpenter, the new Managing Director of NISO, will be talking about the “New NISO” at the LITA Standards IG at Annual. Here’s the details:

The New NISO: New structures, goals and initiatives.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
4:00 PM- 5:30 PM
Washington Convention Center room: Room 143 B

The announcement ends: “Discussions of future directions for the development of standards in emerging areas of interest will be welcome.” Here’s the opportunity for engagement—let’s make sure we take advantage. [Also note that the IG is looking for a vice-chair/chair-elect—contact Eva Bolkovac (eva.bolkovac@yale.edu) if you’re interested.]

Comments, anyone?

She began by explaining the RDA development structure, including the small paid staff supporting the effort. She described the reasons behind RDA’s development, and expressed a teensy bit of regret that she has stepped down as ALA rep just as things got really interesting. She pointed out some of the things that hampered RDA’s development:
• too much hype, too many hard to achieve goals
• need for backwards compatibility interfered with looking forward
• tight funding and time line
• success of the standard tied to the success of the product
• consultation process needed improvement

Consulting with other communities has been an issue all along, both in determining what communities should be consulted, and what was to be gained by consulting with them. Clearly archives and museum communities were important, but also other communities beyond libraries with whom metadata sharing was desired or who had something specific to offer.

In discussing what is gained by consultation, obviously metadata interoperability is paramount, but a better technology focus coming from outside libraries has also been a gain. In the context of learning from other communities, Jennifer mentioned that her eXtensible catalog project team includes an anthropologist, and they have found that association to be very useful.

Successful consultations must be at the appropriate level, and may need to be ongoing, rather than one time. Difficulties arise with funding and sustainability for those kinds of consultations. Jennifer included some recommendations for RDA:
• move forward to first release in 2009
• aggressively move forward with RDA application profile and related efforts
• restructure the effort to focus more on consultation and less on document editing

Jennifer made some comments on the future of controlled data, and talked about what’s needed:
• need identifiers!
• evaluate the potential based on well designed systems (by implication not based on the systems we have now)
• need better tools for catalogers (she pointed out Gary Strawn in the audience, who has built a number of great tools for Voyager users). As an example she described a tool developed at the U. of R. with computer science students, which is used to disambiguate names
• facilitate faceted browsing

Jennifer talked a bit about what is needed to create new catalogs. She mentioned in particular using web services to enrich data, metadata supporting faceted browsing, and better structured data. She emphasized that we need to encourage more experimentation and research, something not facilitated by current ILS systems. She mentioned some of the new open source developments and suggested that the library community should embrace the new open source software environment, and feed back the results of their work into the standards arena.

This last point lead into a discussion about metadata sharing. Jennifer talked about the need to share local augmentation of data and to think beyond how libraries currently share into some important new territory. She pointedly mentioned the sometimes harsh discussions about visions that populate our list-based discussions. She offered a positive vision for bibliographic control:
• give catalogers effective tools so they can focus on the intellectual effort
• librarians should participate in systems development
• find new ways for catalogers to contribute widely to metadata improvement
• catalogers need to be confident that systems will use their work effectively

To close, Jennifer recommended more positive, decisive future actions, to clearly redefine roles and responsibilities, plus more efforts to explain and justify the tradeoffs for change.

Questions to Jennifer were difficult ones—how, for instance, to ‘market’ the important changes coming without frightening the community, while reassuring the managers that the changes will be significant enough to justify the cost. There was some talk of history, with Brian Schottlaender replaying the transition to AACR2, where erasing cards was a cost factor. He contended that the ability to change native machine-readable cataloging made all the difference, in terms of cost of change. Bob Wolven questioned whether we need library standards to be further deconstructed on a practical level. Jennifer mentioned some tentative plans for using the RDA AP in the extensible catalog work.

Janet Swan-Hill brought up an ethical issue that arises as libraries seek to cut their costs as well as their contribution to the whole. Sara Shatford Layne spoke during the public comment period, urging us not to forget the academic researcher, as user, in our deliberations. She also supported the notion that we need more structured data rather than less, and extolled the virtues of authority data. She urged us to remember that “cataloging is a public good” and should not be judged only by its economic value.

Kevin Randall was the second person signed up to speak. He felt that there was no inherent conflict between the first two speakers: one spoke of the content, the other the container. He was worried less about containers, except when they leaked, but was more concerned about the content. He was also concerned that there were still few good tools for catalogers. He spoke as well about the CONSER standard record, which has been a topic of discussion for over a year. The record focuses on ‘access,’ not ‘identification.’ He felt it was rushed, and not properly identified as a ‘less than full’ alternative. Kevin suggested that there was a need to think about the nature of the cooperative structure that we have developed over time.

A third commenter, Michael Norman from UIUC, discussed a digitization project his institution has with the Open Content Alliance. Some of the resources scanned had not been checked out in many years, but were now being downloaded repeatedly. As this work is being done they are exploring options to add value to the metadata (citations, TOC data, indexes). Since there is no place for this information in MARC, they have been experimenting with using METS. He mentioned also the single vs. multiple record issue, now exacerbated by the scanning projects, and hoped that there would be more discussion about those issues. He pointed out that libraries’ use of OAI-PMH should improve the general quality of metadata. Michael also spoke briefly about how automated metadata generation is being considered as part of the package moving forward, for their institutional repository, for instance.

Clifford Lynch, in an inspired role as summarizer, took over the microphone. He first urged the audience to consider submitting additional comments to the website. He also said that he would attempt to build some bridges to the next meeting, as the WG was thinking about what questions should be considered as they approach “Economics and Organization of Bibliographic Data” as their third topic.

He voiced his intention to extract the things he did hear that were of interest, as well as what he was amazed he didn’t hear. He mentioned the first speaker’s focus on quality control, and what that might imply as we consider our shared bibliographic enterprise. He pointed out that quality is never perfect, and in an operational way in systems we should think carefully about how to measure quality. Once we can talk about measuring, we can begin to talk about the economics of the problem, within an environment of constrained funding. We don’t really know the trade offs yet, but we should think about whether we can provide the proper value systems to promote quality.

Cliff mentioned the “insightful comments” on the importance of legacy vocabularies, and the importance of exploring the economic issues of opening these things up. He pointed out the important place these will take in our infrastructure. He wondered why we hadn’t spoken much about examining the content of things like name authorities, especially in the context of the needs of publishers and rights organizations. He mentioned the discussion of codification of bibliographic practice, but thinks that the more central questions come with the notion of completely digital objects that can be operated on in a computational way. He was interested that this did not come up in the discussion since it will come up again, particularly in the economic discussions.

As for the use of the term ‘bibliographic control’—we will have physical objects around for a while, with surrogates a part of our life for some time to come. The final commenter inspired him to think about how much of the content will migrate to the metadata, and how we might think about a world ahead full digital things, where we may need to draw some line between one and the other. This is no longer a theoretical question, clearly.

Cliff mentioned the discussions about tools and uses of metadata by systems–the systems we use now clearly affect our view. In terms of tools for cataloging, it needs to be asked—what are we trying to do better? Quality control? More efficiency? Richer description? What should be our priorities in terms of tools?

At the end he told a story about a group he ran into recently called the “Proofreader’s Collective” proofreading text transcriptions, with Project Gutenberg and other projects. He wondered whether this model might be taken advantage of as we discuss issues like quality control. Three important issues to take away: (1) there is a dichotomy between perfect record and the reality of resource descriptions; (2) there is important value in legacy vocabularies; (3) there are significant systems issues when metadata moves around.

In Cliff’s view there are a lot of players in the arena of standards development, and we need to be able to explain these efforts better. We also need to discuss the economics and value of having standards openly accessible. The IETF and W3C have been successful because they have made their activities easily accessible; NISO has also taken up this challenge. If these descriptive standards are to have an impact they must be widely and easily available, in convenient forms, and the economics of this issue must be addressed.

Richard Stewart, Indian Trails Public Library, wondered at the lack of comments by public libraries. He mentioned that we do have common ground, but also have needs that haven’t been addressed sufficiently in this process. Cliff suggested that the WG would welcome comments from public libraries.

James Nye, a University of Chicago bibliographer for Asian collections, mentioned the issues of regional scripts and the systems to handle them. He mentioned that the standards we use don’t effectively provide access to users in those areas, which limits the possibilities for collaboration with librarians in these areas as well.

Joan Scuitema University of Illinois, Chicago, pointed out that there is a lot of black and white thinking in libraries and systems. At some point in her career she acquired a degree as a therapist, and she notes that in an environment of extreme change, this tendency to ignore the gray areas is exacerbated. She urged the group to ‘move back to the center’ and deal realistically with these issues, and resist the urge to declare anything less than perfection a failure.

Richard Amelung pointed out that the issue of scripts is one of those common grounds with public libraries, who provide services to a broad diversity of immigrant communities.

Marc Gartler, Harrington College of Design, in a comment about image data, noted our current approach to images lacks sufficient granularity.

Deanna Marcum, in her final thoughts, described LC’s position as a large gray area. She mentioned Jennifer’s presentation and her note about roles and responsibilities, and mentioned that LC has been widely misunderstood in those conversations. When the strategic planning process began, she read all the LC annual reports, a difficult but enlightening process. The early ones were philosophical documents, thoughtful views of what LC should be and do. LC has been the leader for decades in bibliographic control, largely because it has created more records than anyone else, and because it has assumed over time the responsibility to lead in this area. The library has assumed it should be an innovator, but the library has also taken on the task of support and maintenance of the cataloging community, and there’s a conflict between the structure need for this support and that needed to innovate. LC understands and appreciate the confidence others have in the institution, but also want to innovate where they can.

LCs task is to serve all libraries, all citizens, other national libraries, etc., but the balance for future decisions is complicated by a lack of new and continuing resources. Not all the library’s holdings are under bibliographic control, and those that aren’t also are not really available to users. Is it more important to make them available, perhaps by digitization, or to bring them under bibliographic control? She also mentioned that the technology they have now does not support other scripts.

When she met with the ALA Board two summers ago, she was asked how much money was in the LC budget to support its service to other librarians. The answer is “zero.” Congress has never supported financially this kind of service thought they support it in theory. They would like to continue to do this, but the challenge is great.

Deanna Marcum welcomed the group, introduced its task and expectations and mentioned the group’s website: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/. She mentioned LC’s strategic planning process (38 working groups—whoa!), and in particular a report that is in process on the history of bibliographic control, from 2000 B.C. forward. She promised that this report would be made available when completed.

José-Marie Griffiths emphasized that the group welcomes feedback from the community, and invited the participants to engage with the group on these issues.

Brian Schottlaender moderated the “Biblio-palooza.” He mentioned that the format had changed from the Oakland meeting in March, which he described as “more of a talking heads meeting.” This was designed to be more interactive, with most of the afternoon devoted to open discussion. He expressed his hope that the ideas discussed would allow the WG to make their recommendations. He also mentioned that the non-discreet cameras at each side of the room were there for the purpose of recording audio and video for a cybercast to be made available by the Library of Congress. [Brian mentioned an article that I didn’t get the cite for] which described the rapidly changing landscape and the new difficulties in creating order from this yeasty chaos. He then read the questions that the WG distributed for discussion at this meeting:

1. What kinds of structures and standards are needed to provide effective bibliographic control in the environmental spectrum spanning consumer uses and management uses? How can we make better use of current structures and standards in meeting both consumer and management user needs? What relevant communities need to have input and what organizational structures would best support this?

2. Libraries and related cultural heritage organizations have made a major investment in controlled data. These include structures for organizing subjects, personal and corporate names, place names, roles and relationships, time periods, etc. What role will these data play in networked environments? What is the relationship to the semantic web, tagging, or other newer approaches? How do these data work across database silos? How are supporting infrastructure pieces (gazetteers, controlled vocabularies, etc.) situated and maintained?

3. Data are created to be processed by applications. We mine data for meaning; merge and manipulate data for display; use data to support supply chains and inventory control; share data between repositories and discovery environments. Are our structures and standards appropriate to this reality?

4. What requirements are placed on our bibliographic structures through new application areas, such as mass digitization and greater off-site storage, or the desire to create richer user interfaces and integrated discovery environments?

5. Libraries now manage different flows of data, created within different regimes, much of it outside the library environment. They also want their data and services to appear in other environments. At the same time, we see more reuse and flow of data across publishers, libraries, agents, other bibliographic services, etc. What does this mean for our bibliographic structures and standards?

The first speaker was David Bade of the University of Chicago. David is a cataloger, and distributed to the group a written paper that he read almost word for word. The paper itself was 12 fully packed pages, followed by an appendix with “ten examples of bibliographic records found in OCLC (before and after correction) [that] clearly demonstrate problems in the organizational infrastructure for creating and maintaining bibliographic information in an environment of different flows of data … ]. Further, “ … the theory of librarianship which informed the [Working Group’s] background paper is unmistakably a theory of industrial production, transportation and storage, in which meaning is ‘mined’ rather than created, and information flows and is merged and manipulated but never interpreted, evaluated or corrected.” [emphasis the author’s]

It goes on, a passionate rant from a frustrated intellectual, but sadly, its ideas were not effectively presented, and whatever germ of usefulness contained therein was tainted by the inability of the author to understand the realities of how technology has changed our environment. This was a deeply ‘conservative’ (in the classic sense) screed, delivered by a rather improbable Don Quixote (in t-shirt and beret). But the windmill he tilts at is whirring madly, and he is unequal to the task of stopping it.

The second speaker is me, and since I have no ability to speak and blog at the same time, you’ll have to wait for the cybercast or look at the slides.

The third speaker was Jane Greenberg on the faculty at the University of North Carolina. Jane started with a cartoon (helpfully labeled as “comic relief”) having to do with cats, boxes, and doing things outside said receptacles, then moved on to one where a grandmotherly type introduces a range of books to a child, saying “It’s a library, honey—kind of an early version of the World Wide Web.”

Jane described the standards landscape as she saw it, consisting of three silos: Data Structure Standards, Data Communication Standards, Data Value Standards. She discussed in general how these standards have developed and where they might fit together in the future.

She then attempted to address the specifics of the questions asked by the WG, by ‘classifying’ them (which the audience appreciated). She suggested that we needed a broad range of standards and that context should determine the most appropriate ones to the task. She plugged the upcoming publication “Knitting the Semantic Web” she edited for CCQ, as well as my NSDL Registry (thanks, Jane!) In attempting to discuss the ‘continuum’ where traditional bibliographic control meets social tagging, she showed a slide I couldn’t see that well, but which illustrated this “ontology continuum’ as she called it. She closed with a set of her own questions (some more research questions than ones that could be answered immediately), expanding on the questions asked by the WG.

To be continued …

This month’s highlights for me were:

“NISO Forms New Education Committee” –an announcement of a newly formed Education Committee (which includes some librarian members) charged with developing training programs. Several are already scheduled, covering the themes of licensing issues (June 11), e-resource management (September 24-25), usage statistics (November 2), and institutional repositories (December 3). The Committee has a webpage at: http://www.niso.org/committees/education/index.html

“EDitEUR, ONIX for Licensing Terms – Publications License message format (ONIX-PL), Draft 0.9.26” This is a new draft of the specification to support the communication of license terms for electronic resources between licensors and licensees, and includes change recommendations from the NISO License Expressions Working Group. (see: http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html for the draft and http://www.niso.org/committees/License_Expression/LicenseEx_comm.html for information about the NISO License Expressions Working Group.)

“Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing Across Libraries, Archives and Museums” –this First Monday article by Mary Elings and Günter Waibel discusses the common needs for metadata standards within and among cultural heritage and library communities, and suggests areas where these standards need to be more coordinated. The article can be found at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/elings/index.html

You can take a look at the most recent NISO Newsline on the web at http://www.niso.org/news/newsline/NISONewsline-Apr2007.htm and note the subscription instructions at the bottom of the page, so you can have it delivered to your mailbox regularly!

Karen reminds us in the interview that libraries and librarians have been deeply involved in creating and using standards for more than a century. The world is certainly a lot more confusing than it was in Dewey’s day, and the standards development going on around us not always easy to track and understand. We should certainly take Karen as our model for involvement and take our place in that history.

You’ll see me make some specific suggestions for that involvement in this space, over the next few months.

[NOTE: I'd promised to blog this session for the new ALCTS NRMIG Metadata Blog, but since one person at ALCTS must approve all potential bloggers and has no sense of urgency about it, I'm posting it on the LITA Blog. Maybe ALCTS will get their act together for Annual?]

The description for this session was pretty tempting:

“If RDA is attempting to be “all things for all,” is it accomplishing its goal with Dublin Core, LOM, and visual resources communities? We have heard from many perspectives, commentaries to RDA from “traditional cataloging” communities, but what is it to different metadata communities? We have very little direct information from those communities how they think this content standard will work for them. This discussion will address these issues.”

I was originally asked to participate in this panel, but declined because of a conflict with MARBI. Once the MARBI agenda came out and I realized that the issues I was interested in wouldn’t be discussed on Saturday, I decided to come to the presentation and see what came up at the discussion.

The first presenter was Barbara Tillett, from the Library of Congress. A little bird told me that she was not originally invited but asked to be on the panel (and who could turn down Barbara?) [NOTE: Barbara has asserted to me that this isn't so.] Her presentation was pretty standard RDA high-level marketing, which anyone who has been attending the regular RDA Forums has heard before. The problem is that like all of the RDA marketing materials, it is very well crafted and its points are extremely difficult to argue with at the level presented. It’s essentially “comfort food”—without sufficient nutritional content to address the questions that the IG intended to discuss, designed to make the masses feel better about what’s going on and have faith that it will all turn out well in the end. One would think, had one been living in a cave for the past six months, that there had been no sharp questions about the RDA effort asked on multiple discussion lists, listening to Barbara’s presentation. And it was far too long.

Among the last slides in Barbara’s talk was one that was very telling about the approach the RDA effort is taking. The statements on that slide:

“No significant changes to existing records will be required”
“Need for retrospective adjustments when integrating RDA and AACR2 records will be minimal”

This indicates fairly clearly that the more significant calls for change in approach to RDA are not being heard—very discouraging. Barbara’s reassurance that this change would be nothing like the upheavals associated with AACR2 over 25 years ago was very interesting. Could it be that the conservatism we’re still seeing in the RDA work harks back to that historic period?

Murtha Baca (from the Getty) spoke about trends in the art and cultural heritage communities. These communities have cobbled together a group of metadata standards (both “content” standards like Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) and metadata schemas like CDWA Lite and VRA Core) to accommodate the wide variety of materials they must describe. It’s important to note that one reason that there are so many standards in this context is that AACR2, traditionally focused on books and printed works, has never met the needs of this community. As a result, they have done what many specialist communities have done—given up and moved on. That they’ve accomplished this task so effectively is both laudable and ultimately problematic, since they, too, are finding it necessary to emphasize efficiency and user focus, goals not so easy to accomplish without coordination with the larger community.

Murtha noted some differences with the library community in regard to FRBR definitions of works and the fact that this community is often dealing with unique items rather than published items available broadly. She also emphasized the life cycle aspects of metadata creation in cultural institutions, but this suggests that the issues of functional conflict when information acts as both “inventory” and “user access tool” are also inherent in their approaches. Murtha’s last slide was a winner, one she got from a colleague: “Standards are like toothbrushes, everyone agrees that they’re a good idea but nobody wants to use anyone else’s.”

Sarah Shreeves (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) spoke primarily about shareable metadata, and her work with others on guidelines to enhance the reusability of metadata. Her definition of shareable included:
* Is quality metadata (she references the metadata quality chapter written by me and Tom Bruce in “Metadata in Practice”—for which I thank her!)
* Promotes search interoperability
* Is human understandable outside it’s local context
* Is useful outside of its local context
* Is machine processable

These criteria are really important—and the ideas behind them are quite new to most catalogers, who tend to have an entirely different notion of quality based primarily on experience with MARC databases. These notions of quality have yet to penetrate the RDA effort, though I’m not sure how many people noticed that disparity, and Sarah didn’t flog the issue.

She shifted focus to the DLF effort, which now mandates MODS. I was puzzled by the fact that she said that the DLF effort decided to mandate use of MODS because of frustration with the use of OAI with Simple Dublin Core. Since I know that Sarah of all people understands that Dublin Core is far more than the Simple DC 15 elements which OAI mandates as a base, I found this statement disturbing, as it tends to proliferate the confusion about Dublin Core that has been problematic for those of us attempting to teach librarians about metadata standards.

Mary Woodley (Cal State Northridge) had the unenviable task of wrapping up the presentations prior to the promised discussion. She approached her task from the point of view of the traditional SWOT model (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and another model suggested by Joseph Busch: ROT (Redundancy Obsolete Trivial). Mary spoke from the viewpoint of a cataloger who also spends a lot of time training students in research methods and helping them at the reference desk. She described the information seeking behavior of her clientele and suggested that if we don’t take a more drastic approach to change we will become irrelevant—a concern that has been expressed frequently. As part of her focus on user needs, she suggested that the RDA effort would benefit from attention to research studies on user expectations and behavior. Barbara tried to argue that standards don’t develop from user studies, but, on the other hand, the FRBR model talks about user needs but not in enough detail to provide much guidance for RDA development (a point I would have made, if I’d had the chance).

But at the end, the discussion never happened—there was no time, given that an extra presentation had been added at the last moment. There were a few comments and questions asked in the remaining 10 minutes or so, but during the last few minutes, a disgruntled public librarian took the floor and ranted about changes she didn’t like, and the rest of us packed our bags and left.
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Addendum: The following was received from Allene Hayes, the coordinator of the session:

I want to correct the misinformation about Barbara Tillett. As the Chair of the ALA ALCTS ERIG, I personally invited Barbara to be on the panel. Barbara accepted, even though to do so added to her already full Midwinter schedule.

I think all panel members did a great job and I’ll take this opportunity to thank Barbara Tillett, Murtha Baca, Sarah Shreeves, and Mary Woodley for a job well done!

I would also like to thank you and everyone else who attended this info packed session.

For those interested, all presentation slides will be posted on the ALCTS ERIG Web page at:

http://www.ala.org/ala/alcts/divisiongroups/ig/er/eresources.htm

The fall has been a busy one for me—October in particular seemed to involve packing and unpacking my increasingly battered suitcases more than usual. A big part of the October flurry of activity involved showing off the first year’s progress of the NSDL Registry (my primary project at the moment) at the Dublin Core Conference in Mexico and the NSDL Annual meeting in Washington, D.C. I’m happy to say that I’ll have the chance to introduce the registry to several ALA audiences at Midwinter, at the LITA Standards IG meeting (already announced), and the ALCTS Subject Analysis Committee (not yet announced) both on Saturday of Midwinter. The Standards IG presentation will also include an introduction to the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) by Joe Tennis of the University of British Columbia.

Interspersed with all this activity have been numerous background conversations on standards in general and how to increase LITA’s (and ALA’s) involvement in standards processes. One of the two important strategies to move these goals forward is the Standards Watch category on the LITA Blog, for which this is the first post (not the last, certainly, and hopefully not all by me!). The second strategy involves the LITA Wiki, still in development, where information about standards in process can be gathered and made available to interested members. As soon as the wiki becomes available I will set up the standards area and invite participation from interested members.

I believe that these efforts can help us maintain our activity between conferences, and make our participation as effective as it can be. I look forward to working with the Standards IG and other LITA groups and others with an interest in standards activities. Please feel free to comment on this post or email me with your ideas and suggestions.

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator
dih1@cornell.edu

Pat told a story about attending an ISO meeting in Asia where one topic was the international trade in ring tones. She pointed out that public identifiers are critical to link heterogeneous services, they require support—technical and social infrastructure. The presenters were asked to talk about what went on behind the scenes to support identifiers.

Regina Reynolds, US ISSN Center, Library of Congress

“The ‘Business’ of ISSN: What Does it Take?”

The center has been around since the early ‘70s. The ISSN is undergoing a major revision, has 80 centers all over the world, the International center in Paris. Governed by a board and has a User Group which had its first meeting in 2005. New centers need training and documentation. A unique key title and metadata record backs up every ISSN assignment.

Decisions are made at the annual meeting. One example was a recent decision not to assign personal blogs ISSNs (for which Regina was soundly vilified by at least one blogger). ISSN assignment is free, but there is an enormous cost to maintain the system, including for title changes and various versions. Budget is 1.5 million euros/year (55-60% is salaries). Revenue comes from country member dues.

ISSN database now has 1,252,191 records as of June 18, growing at the rate of over 50-60,000/year and experiences many maintenance transactions. Access to these records is via the ISSN portal.

Assignments in the US are about 6000/year—is low because many publishers don’t know that various versions/formats need separate ISSNs. Regina hopes to put effort into publisher education to make that clearer. Other challenges: costs/staffing, globalization (ISSN is country-based), “vanity” ISSN seekers, new formats and new technology (hand-held devices are an issue coming up).

Future directions: new products and distribution services, broader coverage, increased interoperability with other standards & services, and increased automation.

Brian Green, International ISBN Agency

“More than you probably want to know about ISBN and other identifiers”

ISBN system devised in the late 1960s, ISO ISBN standard (ISO 2108) first published in 1972, last revised in 1992, then most recently May 2005. UPC introduced a year later. Universally adopted as the key identifier for books. In 1980 the EAN-13 barcode system, based on country prefixes, began to take off. To accommodate books, a new country, Bookland, was created, with its own country prefix. The ISBN community is now discussing incorporation of ISBN into RFID tags.

The ISBN effort was run by the Berlin State Library with no formal agency or governance from 1972-2006. The International ISBN Agency, Ltd. was formed in 2005: not for profit, members are all national agencies, each has one vote (160 of them). Unlike the ISSN is very decentralized—it assigns a group identifier, variable based on the size of the publishing industry in a particular country. A local agency then assigns publisher identifiers, based on number of books anticipated, and the publisher assigns the product portion.

Agencies and publishers in a database available on the ISBN website. There is now an ISBN metadata set, based on a simple ONIX compliant minimum set: ISBN, product form, title, contributors, series, edition, language, publisher, imprint, country, date. Agencies may charge “reasonable” fees for for assignments of ISBN, but some argument about whether the fees are really reasonable. From 2005 national agencies pay membership fees based on GNP and publishing turnover. These funds are used for training, software, and other management tasks.

ISBN is only for books, and manifestations thereof. May be an electronic publication on physical carriers or online (ebooks). A separate identifier is required for each electronic version separately traded. As with ISSN is a “supply chain identifier.” ISBNs can be assigned to parts of books if traded separately (an increasing issue).

The move to 13 digits coming up is very complicated. Standard management tools are now under development, though at present each country has their own system and software. Green seems to be sanguine about the ISBN is meeting and will continue to meet the needs of both libraries and the book trade, including in the digital environment and with increasing issues of granularity. There is an urgent need for interoperability, both horizontal and vertical—accommodating different media, fuller metadata for different purposes, etc.

Green is chair of ISO TC46 SC9, which is the body managing the development of many of the relevant identifier, and the agencies for many of these identifiers are increasingly working together to address issues of interoperability. They are working on use cases and looking at “hub and spoke” metadata mappings to a generic indecs-like generic data dictionary. The use cases are on the ISBN website and Green showed an example of one. The committee has an Identifiers Interoperability Group, which is looking at areas where new identifiers may be needed. One example is the proposed work towards an ISPI (International Standard Party Identifer), an image identifier and license identifiers. Green suggested two websites: http://www.isbn-international.org and http://www.lac-bac.gc.ca/iso/te46sc9/ and cites also Norman Paskin’s article in DLIB (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june03/paskin/06paskin.html) as a good resource.

Chuck Kosher, CrossRef

CrossRef is more a consumer of standards than a standards agency, and talked about what it takes to keep an actionable identifier alive. He began by talking about the DOI and how it’s used. In this world a publisher registers a DOI with CrossRef, and they use assigned prefixes. Someone else who knows about this object comes to CrossRef to find out where it lives. They can then build a link on their page and rely on it to be actionable by users.

Kosher showed a complex diagram (barely readable in my back-of-the-room location), that it would have been nice to see up close, but it did give a flavor of the task. The community that makes this happen was also described (bottom-up):

CNRI: develops and maintains the hardware to run the Handle system.
DOI: maintains the standard, and works with the community of users
CrossRef: provides the linking services and metadata lookup services to support it. maintains the integrity of the services (metadata and link quality)

A lot of this effort is underwritten by the large commercial publishers. Between 10-13 million people a month are finding articles using this service, according to Kosher (no stats on people who don’t find what they’re looking for).

Support structures needed for:
Data construction
Technical issues and education around them
Metadata issues (“semantics are MUCH harder than syntax”)

Also needed:
Staff to keep the systems running
Creative people to move things forward, add new features, maintain service quality

Question: Since personal publishing is getting more prevalent, and these models are run on national agency models, will they scale enough for these new “publishers?”
Answer (Green): Agencies are often free to deviate from the norm, and some are willing to venture into this area especially if these small people are willing to pay. In smaller countries particularly the agencies are not set up to accommodate this. (Reynolds) These people are a problem in a “free” system. (Kosher) CrossRef relies on annual membership fee, then charges a dollar for a DOI. They use “managing agents” where larger publishers stand in for smaller ones, for a fee. (Didn’t really answer the question).

Question: What’s the difference between the DOI and the Handle System? (Kosher) Not much difference, but DOI is more of a community, with more support and social structure. Handle System is more the technology. If you see a “ten-dot” prefix, it’s DOI; if not is probably just Handle.

Question: What happens when a publisher decides to take something down? (Kosher) There’s been very little of that, in most cases a purchaser of assets takes over the responsibility, but they watch out for dead stuff.

Question: What was ESPN and what happened to it? (Green and Reynolds) This was an entrepreneur who seemed to be confusing people, and he was persuaded to change his M.O. and revise his site. (Reynolds) “I wanted to send the bloggers over there!”

Posted by Diane Hillmann (LITA Standards Coordinator)

In the second Sunday session of MARBI, the agenda order of the discussion papers was reversed.

Discussion Paper No. 2006-DP03 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-dp03.html): Incorporation of former headings into MARC 21 authority records. Sally McCallum introduced the paper and gave the background to it. She reported that historic practice was that former headings were given in a note, but many had felt that it should be in more parseable form (“Duh,” commented my neighbor, a sentiment I echo).

Several MARBIes contributed comments initially, endorsing the notion that it was important to include enough information to process on the heading, but pointing out additional problems with some of the proposed solutions. Sherman Clarke asked for a tighter definition of “former heading” since there were several examples that might qualify as such in some local situations and have deleterious effects on the shared body of authorities maintained for the use of all.

Bill Jones pointed out an unstated assumption in the report that a cancelled record or deleted heading is actually removed from the file, which is not necessarily true for the shared file, where such records can be retrieved. Adam Schiff wondered whether the proposal might include changed or deleted scope notes, though there were no reasons in those cases for use of 4XX.

Mary Ann O’Daniel from FCLA reported that they kept a file of deleted and obsolete headings for the use of catalogers, and she suggested that a reference to a deleted record be retained. Stephen Hearn pointed out that the recent changes to the Indian headings resulted in some application instructions on old headings being deleted and important information lost.

One of the members of the committee responsible for the report pointed out that in their discussions they identified situations when a 4XX solution might result in unintended results, such as when a conflict in names is resolved by adding information to one name and not another—in such cases a 4XX for the former heading would conflict with a still valid heading for the other name.

John Attig agreed that it was important to note whether processing is possible using a particular 4XX but the problem is not solved by using a 6XX, and additional instruction in a $w might be necessary to prevent bad outcomes.

There was general consensus that there should be another discussion paper looking at the 4XX possibilities explicitly, and suggest options for resolving the identified problems.

Discussion Paper No. 2006-DP01 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-dp01.html): Recording geographic coordinates in the MARC 21 Authority Format.
As anyone who is still breathing can attest, geo-referenced information is the hot new thing. Google Maps has undoubtedly been responsible for some of the current buzz, but catalogs with functionality based on understanding of geographic information have been around for more than a decade. That said, anyone outside of the specialist map and geography community who looks at the implications of adding information like this can’t help but be a bit overwhelmed. I recall vividly the MARBI Meeting some years ago when many similar capabilities were added to MARC, and wondering at the time whether the efforts would pan out.

That said, there seemed to be general agreement that attempts to accomplish this should be undertaken—or, at least, those that felt differently remained silent. As in most things, the devil is in the details, and how to implement the recording of such data in MARC records seems fairly daunting. John Attig suggested plaintively that the experts just tell us what we should do (the alternative, one presumed, would be an endless late Sunday afternoon discussion on relentlessly technical matters in which only a few in the room would be conversant, much less awake) and that we would move ahead.

It all seemed to boil down to coordinates. Old desires to record scale were dismissed as useless, but clearly there was no feeling on the part of the experts present that coordinate systems were currently at rest (nor would they tend to follow the laws of inertia in future)—but this need not concern the MARBIes, apparently. “Give us a bucket, and let us put data there,” seemed to be the suggestion by the expert contingent.

Most of this data will reside, at least at first, in authority files, and there seemed to be some interest in applying as well notions of temporality, to support the delivery of historic data. Also, since data might be supplied in bulk in some instances, $2 for source was explicitly requested. Inevitably, given the hour, the question of defining what planet the coordinates might apply to was undertaken, and one wag (who shall remain nameless for his own safety) inquired what planet would be used for California?

The discussion will continue, no doubt, with the probability of an additional discussion paper on adding feature information to the records as well.

As a last item, Sally reported on 2006-04 (on FRBR authority models) that appeared and then disappeared from the agenda. The disappearance occurred because it was felt to be premature—suggested experimentation had not occurred or had not been reported.

Adjourned early again–Martha, you’re a marvel!

The meeting started out with an update on RDA by Jennifer Bowen and the beginning of a slightly scary discussion about how MARC might need to respond to the [r]evolution in content description and access. I won’t include much detail on the general points—they’re covered elsewhere and I’m saving my energy for issues later on today. She described the focus groups that had been held so far where cataloging educators and catalogers had an opportunity to look at what ALA Publications was thinking about web-based products for RDA.

A couple of hot-button issues came up in the report, among them ISBD punctuation and GMD (general material designations). Comments on part I are due by Feb. 7, and comment periods for the subsequent parts come along briskly. Jennifer brought up the possibility of a small group getting together to map RDA data elements to MARC. If a group could be brought together within the next couple of months, Jennifer could report that to the JSC for their next meeting in April. Also on the table are general possibilities for MARBI participating in implementation planning.

John Attig reacted to the report as a MARBI member who has been involved as well in the RDA development. He felt that the invitation to collaborate on the mapping would be very positive, if for no other reason than that examples could be coded properly in MARC (though Jennifer pointed out that there’s not been a decision yet on whether that is desirable). Rebecca Guenther asked how much change in MARC might be anticipated or accepted—Jennifer thought that wouldn’t really be known until after the JSC April meeting.

John A. opined that the separation from description and presentation made implementation decisions very important, and that the impact of these should be explored at the earliest opportunity—he mentioned ISBD punctuation as one example. Rich Greene pointed out that, based on the experience with the transition to AACR2, there might be quite a bit of lead time needed by utilities and others, which doesn’t seem to be reflected in the current timeline. Jennifer agreed that training and planning for transition was important, but that the planning for doing so had just begun.

Proposal No. 2006-05 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-05.html): Changes to holdings data fields to accommodate ONIX for Serials in the MARC 21 Holdings Format. Linda Miller of LC introduced the proposal, describing the work of ONIX Joint Working Party (JWP) to create the Serials Release Notification (SRN), designed to allow information on serials releases to move from publishers to vendors of various kinds, and ultimately, to libraries.

The important parts of the proposal include the SRN notion of “named unit” which is not the same as the MARC 844, and the disconnect between what SRN and MARC holdings do with caption abbreviations. There had been discussions on the list about the ambiguity of the “named unit” designation, and Linda recounted the trouble the committee had in coming up with nomenclature, and agreed that there was something to be desired. There was some discussion about where communities of practice have done somewhat different things with named units in 844 and enumeration, but no one seemed particularly uncomfortable with that.

Another issue was the repeatability of $2, which was intended to be repeatable but was not so in the proposal (an oversight, apparently).

Rather than vote on this proposal, it was decided to go on to the discussion paper and see if it affected the perception of what should be done with the proposal.

Discussion Paper No. 2006-DP05 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-dp05.html): Indicating coverage dates for indexes in the MARC 21 Holdings Format. Linda Miller again presented the issues, which revolve around the perennial problem of divergent coverage and publication dates particularly for things like indexes. MARC Holdings doesn’t handle the distinction between the two dates well, but it’s critical in determining how to process SRN data in the real world. Martha Yee commented that there was a lot of support on the list for making this distinction, but because there are so few unreserved alphabetic subfields left, there are real concerns about the best way forward.

John Attig pointed out that the specific information necessary only for indexes is coverage, while publication date is important for all kinds of other things. Because coverage is what is needed by the public, in contrast to publication dates, which are used primarily by acquisitions staff and their systems of prediction, its coverage that is generally used.

Much discussion of the few possibilities continued for some time. Sally McCallum, in a rare demonstration of clutching at straws, asked plaintively whether anyone was distributing SRNs yet and whether we really had any evidence that they would want to distribute both dates, but the group didn’t seem to want to join her in wishful thinking, so problem solving continued.

Ultimately, Martha intervened and suggested that instead of attempting to solve all SRN issues at once, that we take the low road and solve those we could and leave the others for another day. The proposal (2006-05) passed with relief.

Discussion Paper No. 2006-DP02 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-dp02.html): Addition of coded value to 008 for content alerts in the MARC 21 Bibliographic format. Alan Danskin introduced the proposal, which arose out of some work in the UK on materials for users with disabilities. John Attig pointed out that the proposal was very narrowly scoped but addressed a general issue that the MARBIes needed to consider (though he hoped that some better handle than “content alert” could be used). Rich Greene from OCLC sent up a few red flags about the awful possibilities represented by this proposal, particularly as it used up valuable fixed field real estate (and, it should be noted, real estate that had been used for something else before, which is generally avoided for new MARBI development, sort of like brownfields)

Gary Smith from OCLC pointed out that though fixed fields are marginally better for processing they’re also harder to get right, and he advocated that we “stop using the technology of the sixties” to accomplish our aims (to which statement one of my Peanut Gallery companions said, “Amen, brother.”)

Business Meeting: the first item was a proposed program for 2007 (or a sneak program for MidWinter) based on the work of Bill Moen’s MARC Content Designation Utilization work reported on yesterday. The usual hot potato conversation ensued, with no one jumping up to volunteer to do program planning (a black hole for the time and patience-challenged). (MFIG Chair beware—the hot potato is headed your way!)

Sally McCallum reported on updates and changes to documentation, the most interesting piece is the move toward PDF versions of things (to replace paper documentation at some point in the future, most likely). History information might move online only, though firm decisions on how various products might change are not yet made. All hands agreed that it would be good to have PDF in advance of print availability, though MARC changes have long been keyed to the emergence of documentation.

Rebecca Guenther reported that there was a new code coming into the MARC language codes from ISO, to designate “no linguistic content” (zxx). Sally also reported that there would be a new MODS release, with documentation enhanced by the DLF Aquifer group working with MODS.

A representative of the Deutsche Bibliothek reported on the implementation of MARC 21 in Germany and Austria. A translation of MARC 21 into German is coming, also mapping of legacy instance data, which is scheduled for completion in 2007. As in the earlier harmonization efforts with CANMARC and UKMARC, some proposals for additions to MARC 21 might be anticipated at the end of the process. Apparently the dogged German practice of cataloging each volume of multivolume works will continue, and they intend not to use 505 tables of contents, which will, of course, make the integration they seem to desire a bit problematic in some cases.

[To be continued …]

The MFIG meeting, as is its custom, was focused on a particular issue for its meeting: “Authorities: What’s the Future?” The speaker, Mary Mastraccio, Cataloging and Authorities Manager, MARCIVE, Inc., approached her topic with the assumption that her audience was varied, and aimed at the middle of the range. Sadly, the first thing I noticed about her presentation was the use of an odd Powerpoint template with a moving object in the background—the epitome of useless animation. She used various other PowerPoint animation techniques further on, none of which enhanced her presentation.

I was initially confused by her use of the term “database design” which seemed to be used in a very idiosyncratic way—maybe “data design” would have been a better term.
I was disappointed some other ways: she spent too much time ‘resolving’ a vaguely defined, and, in my opinion, a false conflict between “natural” and “structured” approaches—really, is there any argument anymore about this? I surely hope not! Haven’t we been using structured data for decades? Maybe she meant something I didn’t understand by this (always a possibility).

She managed to include some good points about the emerging ‘tagging’ community (a.k.a. folksonomies) but inexplicably ignored totally all the work being done in the space between MARC and tagging—the incredibly important knowledge organization work being done outside of libraries. Many of her comments suggested that she was unaware of this work, and how it should affect the planning going on in library authorities for the future. In quoting some of the ‘social taggers’ who have recently been discovering the utility of agreement on common terms, she suggested that they should learn from us the best way to do this. Maybe it wasn’t just me that thought this was more than a bit condescending?

The speaker presented a fairly extensive demonstration of issues around publisher names, which focused almost entirely on problems of variant transcription, but suggested some very MARC-centric approaches to ‘fixing’ the problem. I wondered why the approach used by archivists—who are perhaps the experts on the management of organizational entity names and have a very different approach—was not mentioned?

The discussion was interesting, however, and ranged from traditional-type cataloger questions to some definitely more informed and interesting comments (am I biased? Yep). I made one comment on the discussion going on in digital library circles about the impossibility of linking resources to creators via authority records, given that the authority record is not the person. One audience member made an intriguing leap, suggesting that the relationship between the person and the authority record was somewhat analogous to that between a work and manifestation.

I think I’d be panicking if I thought that the level of understanding and analysis evidenced by this well-intentioned speaker was truly driving the discussion at the planning level for the use of authority data in the future, but I’m an optimist at heart. Perhaps not enough of one to continue to pay minimal attention to what’s going on in this area, but that’s a thought for another day.

Here we all sit, the MARBIes at the big horseshoe table arrangement, the Peanut Gallery ranged along each long side, preparing for yet another round of stimulating conversation about MARC. Martha Yee is doing her maiden voyage as MARBI Chair—as an old hand, she’s well aware of the prickly personalities she’ll need to herd and the likely byways to steer them away from.

The usual business stuff lead off, introductions, minutes approval, etc. Bill Moen of the University of North Texas was first on the agenda, reporting on the MARC Content Designation Utilization Project (IMLS funded). The project grew out of a previous project on Z39.50 interoperability, which looked primarily at indexing, but questions arose about what was actually used in the records, versus what might be ideal from an indexing point of view. The new project is now analyzing 56 million records from WorldCat, looking at the MARC record as an artifact of the whole cataloging enterprise. One goal is to provide an empirical base for discussion about what actually occurs in catalog records, and what catalogers do about access issues in the real world. Is there a core set of elements that seem to be most used in records, and has the use of MARC changed over time? They are also developing a methodological approach to get at the decision making process that catalogers use.

They’ve just released a statistical analysis in Dec. (8 million from LC; 48 million from other contributors), available from the Project website at: http://www.mcdu.unt.edu. The project is also looking at FRBR user tasks, and what data in the records support those activities, as well as what is missing that should support those activities. They plan to use Delsey’s mapping of elements to evaluate user tasks.

Proposal 2006-01 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-01.html): Changes to accommodate IAML form/genre codes in field 047 in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format. This proposal was a follow up on a discussion held last June, for which the music cataloging community has made some choices of options and further recommendations. From the point of view of anyone who isn’t a music cataloger, this proposal is only of interest insofar as it highlights the issues of expansion of code use in MARC beyond those MARC-centric codes previously preferred. This is no small thing, since machine parsing of both legacy and prospective data requires that backwards compatibility of former strategies for fixed fields and variable fields be maintained—this sometimes requires the use of various “tricks” to tell parsers not to look ‘here’ but ‘there’ instead. The bibliographic utility representatives and various others who worry about how machines look at data (as distinguished from the cataloging types who care more about how catalogers will create the data) understandably would prefer that there be a minimum number of techniques for this, and that the choices follow some principle other than “don’t trust the data” (thanks to Gary Smith for that one!) The proposal passed with some small-ish revisions (see the official notes—whenever they’re distributed–for details) but a mind-numbing discussion of coding implications followed for several minutes more.

Proposal 2006-03 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-03.html): Standardized terminology for access restrictions in field 506 of the MARC21 Bibliographic Format. Robin Wendler introduced this proposal, representing the proposers, the DLF/OCLC Digital Registry Working Group. They would like to change the 506 from an exclusively free text field to one that supports controlled vocabulary or free text. Additional additions include a subfield code to indicate whether restrictions are being expressed or no restrictions as well as adding 506 to the Holdings Format as well as the bib format (Robin pointed out, rightly, that this is where it really belongs anyway).

A question was raised by Sherman Clarke, who wanted to know why codes weren’t used instead of text. Robin answered that ease of use was the primary reason behind the decision for text over codes. The proposal was passed handily.

Proposal 2006-02 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-02.html) Adding subfields for relator terms to X11 fields in the Bibliographic and Authority formats. The essential problem here is to accommodate Relator terms without making a mess by reusing an obsolete code (long a MARBI no-no). Sally McCallum mentioned that there was a suggestion that RDA might change the environment sufficiently that the proposal should not move forward at this point, though this comforting thought was later disputed. Sherman Clarke described the necessity as “a Rosemary Woods situation” where you kind of have to twist yourself around to make the case for it.

Joe Altimus of RLG spoke up against the re-use (the second option), even though all agree that there will be a relatively small number of records affected. He pointed out that one would never know when all old data was effectively “cleansed” and re-use would not be ambiguous. Gary Smith supported that point of view strongly. Marc Truitt proposed that Option 2 be taken off the table, and the committee supported that, effectively passing the proposal with Option 1, creation of a new subfield.

Proposal 2006-04 (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-04.html): Technique for conversion of Unicode to MARC-8. Unicode issues are the ultimate geek issue for MARBI—one that silences the catalogers pretty thoroughly as a rule. There had been considerable discussion on the list of the proposal, with some rough consensus on the best possibilities. Given my rather rudimentary understanding of Unicode translation issues, I refer interested parties to the official notes for the real story (or ask Gary Smith, who’s the real expert on MARBI for these issues). At the end of the discussion, Gary opined that we would know a great deal more about these issues by the Summer meetings, as the utilities are just now getting data with UTF-8, and learning much about the nitty-gritty of translation.

The meeting was adjourned early—thank you Martha! [Time for lunch, which we figured wasn’t possible under the new, diet-friendly schedule.]

Sally McCallum from LC was the first speaker, and she started by talking about XML in general, characterizing it as “just another data structure.” She pointed out that XML has more capability for hierarchy than MARC21, and noted that this could be either good or bad. She briefly discussed the place of XML schemas in the definition of tags and structure.

After a rapid fire review of why we want to do XML at all, Sally went over what METS was (which I suspect was a bit confusing for the uninitiated), and talked about other new XML-based metadata formats for rights, preservation, and technical information, as well as MARCXML, as a precursor to MODS and MADS. [It was a very quick overview, and probably difficult to digest for the uninitiated (way too many acronyms, for one thing)—a handout with the acronyms explained might have been useful.]

Sally finally moved on to MADS, and described the structure and tags for the authority structures within MADS. Top level tags are authority, related and variant and each has the same substructure. She also described the different attributes for the related and variant terms, most of which seem to be intended to keep intact most of the MARC21 authority structures.

Other elements have been added to accommodate other communities, and Sally explained affiliation and fieldOfActivity and their potential uses, even when (as in the case of affiliation) LC and the library community have no history or intent to populate or use the information.

Sally presented the change from numeric to English tags as a positive move, but clearly there is an issue with internationalization in this approach. She suggested that others could substitute different language tags and make transformations—this strikes me as a very problematic assumption—much cleaner perhaps to keep the numerics and substitute appropriate language names within a user interface.

Several MADS features were cited, among them linking capabilities and special attributes available for all elements (such as language and script). Sally invited attendees to participate in the MADS development (carried out on the MODS mailing list). In response to questions, she was very reluctant to predict how the two formats would be used after an “experimental” period.

Second speaker was Diane Boehr, from NLM, who described NLM’s planned exposure of their authority files in XML. NLM needed the capability to create a centralized, shared authority file for some of their web-based products. This project involved only names, not subjects (those are dealt with by their MeSH section), using their Voyager authority file as their central repository.

Interestingly, though this was a centralized file, not all participants were required to use the same content guidelines (e.g, AACR2), and they chose to perceive the variations as a way to enrich their cross-reference structure. They developed a DTD to enable this, which included different reference structures and accommodated different preferences and practices across NLM projects.

As a NACO participant, NLM still needed to pay attention to AACR2 and MARC21 when redistributing information. They used a combination of $8, a $0[initials], a $9 N value and some local heading tags to manage these variant needs and to suppress NACO distribution for information that was not NACO compliant. She showed some examples of this approach that had the interesting effect of reinforcing the reality that MARC21 is still both standard and flexible.

The NLM DTD did not use MADS because they needed to match the attributes of their bibliographic DTD and did not require direct correlation with every MARC field. They would like to go to XML schemas but are not ready to do so because of their legacy of DTD use.

Diane gave extensive explanations (rather too extensive for my tastes, but I can’t speak for the rest of the audience!) of the other characteristics of their work, which seems primarily oriented towards controlling output for various purposes. [Note for subsequent programs: XML on the screen is virtually useless—please provide handouts if you need to discuss details!]

Diane cites the primary advantages of their shared authority system as improved quality control and the ability to expose multiple, customizable outputs. She also asserted that their approach to multiple languages as better than the multiple, linked authorities approach used by MARC21 (as an example the way the Canadians use French and English separate records).

Louisa Kwok, the third speaker, discussed the work at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Library to define an XML-based schema to mark up multi-lingual and multi-script attributes of name information. Their implementation was intended to deal with the problem of identifying Chinese authors using the romanized forms of names used in traditional authority records.

She differentiated between name access control and authority control—which she defined as the difference in designating an authorized form and providing extensive, enriched support for identification of name usage. She further explained a “person model” based on FRBR: Person→Name→Name form. Variations in name form can be due to language, script or Romanization scheme, but all are used to facilitate access to the person and his or her works. The XML format is based on MARCXML (not MADS). Sadly, too many of her examples were unviewable from the audience—again, handouts would have been extremely helpful. She also demonstrated (too much, in my opinion) the workflow and processes for enhancing regular authority records to create the Name Access Control records. The room cleared out a bit after her presentation, even before a stretch break was declared.

Kevin Clarke, fourth speaker, began personfully with an explanation of goals for the XOBIS program. This project has attempted to combine the schemas for bibliographic and authority data, rather than separate them, relying on reusable components. According to the program announcement, “XOBIS hopes to foster the use of traditional library metadata in the digital realm,” though they’ve chosen to do so by using very different. As an example “Being” is used to describe “Specific identities of tangible or intangible beings (living or dead), including personifications.” Thank goodness we’re not losing track of those personifications!

Interestingly, in the midst of this differently modeled and denominated structure remains the “main entry,” presumably for the purpose of being able to map back to the old world. Clarke sees relationships (a big part of XOBIS) as a “growth industry” for catalogers, since these relationships are hard for machines to do well.

“What about the billion or so records that would have to be converted?” asks Clarke, rhetorically. A big job, he admits, and the audience tittered. A big job, indeed, and its difficult to see where the big payoff would occur.

Thom Hickey, the fifth speaker (oh dear, is this fair, to be the fifth of six on a Sunday afternoon?), discussed OCLC’s web service experiments with authority control. Thom first demonstrated an authority control component built for a DSpace implementation, which was limited in scope but pointed out the need for changes in the software to accommodate authorized forms. The service needs to be moved to standard protocols, ranking should be improved, it now links to OCLC rather than LC, and the files are not complete. Attention also needs to be paid to sustainability questions for what is now a free, though researchy, service.

Most valuable of Thom’s points were where a cool demonstration gave way to discussion of what’s still needed for persistent, useful services for authority data—things like free resolution services, persistent identifiers, and competent middleware. He also discussed the gaps in the traditional authority files themselves, which make support for institutional repositories and international libraries spotty.

There were also some tantalizing bits on the Virtual International Authority File and the OPAC Network In Europe Shared Authority Control, though Thom’s approach was at such a different level from the previous speakers that it was difficult to relate his points to their actual implementations.

Joanna Pong was the final speaker, describing the HKCAN, a cooperative project of seven academic libraries in Hong Kong, implementing an approach to the language, script and Romanization issues for Chinese names. Joanna launched quickly into slides with complex authority record representations, testing the focus and stamina of the audience. I admit that by that time my attention had flagged, and her soft, liltingly accented but speedy delivery made her difficult to follow, unless she was reading the slides. Of all the presentations, this one suffered from an excess of “how-we-did-it-good” without much reference to other approaches, including that of the other Hong Kong library presented earlier in the afternoon.

The IG should be commended for putting together such a rich and interesting program, but flogged gently with a wet issue of Cognotes for cramming six speakers into three hours with no chance for any discussion or even an opportunity for the speakers to ask questions of one another (often a good way to bring up good questions when the room is too large for good participation).

Diane Hillmann
Dih1@cornell.edu

By way of introduction, I’ve been a MARBI watcher and participant since about 1988, rotating back and forth from the “Big Table” (as Liaison from the American Association of Law Libraries and LITA Representative) and the “Peanut Gallery” (the audience section, often consisting of a considerable proportion of ex-denizens of the “Big Table”).

In the old days, MARBI was the ALA home base for the data geeks, and there were often three half-days of meetings every six months. The agendas were full and the documentation for the meetings, when printed out (we didn’t bring laptops then) often approached an inch or more piled up. That was in the days before the distractions of MODS, METS and such, when MARBI was still lively and fractious. Now the issues are generally a bit niche and often ho-hum, and there are few in the room below the age of forty. There’s still a lot of candlepower, however, and those of us nostalgic for good discussions about data flogging still hang around. Occasionally we’re rewarded for our loyalty.

Adam Schiff is the chair this year. Like most MARBI chairs of recent memory, he was appointed from outside the MARBI community. (Why that is so has been a point of some speculation.) He’s a competent chair, though, and keeps the meeting moving, with respect for diverse opinion.

John Attig (Penn State), eminence gris and unofficial historian of MARBI, presented the first proposal, having to do with a change in coding instruction for languages in 041. [Proposal 2005-07: Revision of Subfield $b in Field 041 in the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2005/2005-07.html] This issue arose as DVD’s with both captions and subtitles, sometimes in multiple languages. The restriction imposed by the current instructions make unambiguous encoding impossible. Rich Greene (OCLC) pointed out that this would remain a problem for legacy data, since records could not be retrofitted. Everett Allgood (NYU) suggested that summary and abstract information is quite different from subtitles, and perhaps deserved a separate subfield.

Subsequent to this, others brought up examples of other auxiliary text that might also be in other languages. John Attig suggested that trying to straighten out the whole mess of languages in multimedia might take a lot of time and effort, and AVIAC (who made this proposal for a simple fix) seemed to be concerned about opening up the proverbial can of worms and ending up with no improvement at all. Karen Coyle suggested that this simple change could be made now, and the large problem could be revisited later, if the group desired. Adam Schiff mentioned that there was a comment made online about the ambiguity of the word “subtitle” in this context, and suggested the substitution of “subtitling” instead. Others in the room were not convinced that the change was necessary. “Summary, abstract or subtitles” was suggested as an alternate wording, and the proposal was passed.

Rebecca Guenther (LC) introduced Proposal 2005-4/R: Hierarchical Geographic Names in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format [http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2005/2005-04R.html], explaining the tangled history of this, the fourth iteration of the proposal. The issues brought up by this proposal are interesting, in that the practices and points of view of two different communities have continually clashed over this seemingly innocuous proposal. To some extent, the problem is more fundamental than the proposal implies, given that the approach seems to push past the realistic limit of text strings, particularly when you throw in indexing considerations. The separation of 6XX and 7XX to express “aboutness” and the attempt to provide other discovery options relevant to place, while retaining some notion of standard hierarchy seemed often a bit rarefied. Some of the discussion about cities on various planets (and the piling up of “what if” scenarios with more arcane possibilities–moons in other galaxies, for instance) began to sound almost surreal.

The discussion came down, finally, to the need for a flexible compromise and acceptance of ambiguity, letting the thesaurus chosen drive the hierarchy decisions. Ultimately, of course, any text string solution seems somewhat doomed, even with as much ambiguity wrung out of it as possible. Oh, for a solution that dispenses completely with text strings and refers directly to a geographic thesaurus (letting the thesaurus manage the hierarchy)! Not likely anytime soon, and the lack of a $w in the proposal means that when it is possible, there’s no clear upgrade path.

The proposal passed after a clutch of wording changes were incorporated (see the official minutes for full details—they’ll probably be posted by Midwinter, give or take a month.)

Paul Cauthen introduced Proposal 2005-08: Changes to Accommodate IAML Coded Data in Bibliographic Fields 008/18-19, 047 and 048
[http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2005/2005-08.html]. He described the love/hate relationship that the music community has had with these fields, and the decision to come back to add codes maintained by someone other than MARC. The proposal would incorporate IAML form and genre, and medium of performance codes in MARC 21. Most of the discussion revolved around the practicalities of using non-MARC codes without adding ambiguity. Some very detailed discussion of the examples and alternatives ensued, which I will not repeat here. The vendor community was concerned about variable fields with trailing blanks, pointing out that assigning meaning under such circumstances is an exercise in futility, and that option was nixed in favor of either 2 character MARC codes or 3 character IAML codes.

Then the tide turned. It was pointed out that there were only 2 008 bytes, and potential more than one coded 0XX field to characterize. After some additional discussion, including the suggestion that the codes just be added to MARC, and the proposal was sent back for reworking and further discussion in the music community, splitting out the 048 portion of the proposal, and passing that portion only, with a change in the indicator position.

In the business portion of the meeting, Sally McCallum (LC) reported on updates to the MARC 21 documentation and MODS and MADS (for authorities). LC will be moving to the Unicode version of the Voyager system soon, and certainly the fact that RLG and OCLC are also moving closer to Unicode implementations has heated up the discussions of Unicode issues.

Everett Allgood, the CC:DA Representative to MARBI, reported on the efforts towards a new cataloging code, which will certainly be reported elsewhere. A joint meeting of CC:DA and MARBI (always an interesting clash of cultures) is proposed for next summer, when there will likely be more substance to discuss. Everett asked if the group would like to see the drafts as they appear. Karen Coyle expressed her strong feeling that the technology people need to be discussing the issues at the same time that the cataloging code is discussed, in order that the concerns about system changes not provide a drag on the efforts for change. John Attig opined that, at least for part I, there might not be big changes required—but changes should be considered even if not explicitly required.

The chair discussed some ALA Council proposed changes to the ALA 2006 Conference Schedule that will begin with Midwinter San Antonio. The big issue is that there are no three hour meetings (horrors!) and breaks are mandated after two hours. This problem caused much consternation, old habits dying hard (especially for aging librarians), and the most well received suggestion was to shift the longer scheduled meeting from Saturday to Sunday and retain the Monday meeting time if needed. Much grumbling was heard about 8 am meeting times and the notion of having to schedule four hour meetings when three hours were needed.

The last item on the agenda was a resolution by Jim Agenbroad (LC, retired) aimed at the ALA Membership Meeting on “Equal Access to Nonroman Resources.” Jim has long been on a laudable, if somewhat quixotic quest to improve the situation for non-Roman script materials (and special characters—he’s also supported my own quixotic effort, dating from the early 90s, to get the section symbol approved for MARC), and can be counted on to comment on Unicode proposals and reports where few others do. Adam Schiff described the process that the resolution would encounter. Karen Coyle noted that without a section in the resolution suggestion how ALA might play a leadership role, it was unlikely to go anywhere, even if passed. She noted that there are lots of interesting questions around this issue, and it’s possible that this might go somewhere if the right people were in the room, addressing practicalities. Some additional discussion is expected tomorrow when a Unicode report is on the agenda. Stay tuned.

The last announcement was that Martha Yee (an old MARBI hand) would be next year’s chair. Good luck, Martha …

Diane Hillmann
Cornell University
Dih1@cornell,edu