The latest NISO Newsline arrived in my email mailbox last week, and provided its usual brisk overview of the standards landscape. I’d like to recommend to other LITA members that a subscription to the Newsline is an excellent way to keep track of what’s going on in standards. Each month, there are a number of reports on NISO activities, an overview of new specifications and standards, and a gathering of media stories about standards of interest.
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!