Standards Watch

Two Upcoming ISO Ballots

Cindy Hepfer, ALA’s Voting Representative to NISO, has notified us of two new items coming up for ballot early in the New Year.

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