Interlibrary Loan Standards Undergoing Revision at the ISO Level

My employer (LYRASIS) is a member of NISO (the accredited standards organization for information and documentation in the U.S.), and as the primary contact I see and consider ballots for standards issues that impact LYRASIS member libraries. The Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Application Protocol Specification (a.k.a. ISO 10160/10161) is up for its periodic review, and there is a bit of interesting movement on this standard. ISO 10160/10161 became a standard in 1993 so it predates the modern era of the web. The group shepherding the standard realized that progress had overtaken the specification and they started work on a reformulation of inter-machine ILL standards. This ballot and its supplemental documentation gives a view of the plans.

What To Do With ISO 2709:2008?

My employer recently became a member of NISO and I was made the primary representative. This is my first formal interaction with the standards organization heirarchy (NISOANSIISO) and as one of the side effects I’m being asked to provide advice to NISO on how its vote should be cast on relevant ISO ballots. Much of it has been pretty routine so far, but today one jumped out at me — the systematic review for the standard ISO 2709:2008, otherwise blandly known as Information and documentation — Format for information exchange. You might know it as the underlying structure of MARC. (Though, to describe it accurately, MARC is a subset or profile of ISO 2709.) And the voting options are: Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote).

New Web Expectations and Mobile Web Techniques

Late last year I was asked to put together a 20-minute presentation for my employer (LYRASIS) on what I saw as upcoming technology milestones that could impact member libraries. It was a good piece, so I thought I’d share what I learned with others as well. The discussion was in two parts — general web technologies/expectations and mobile applications/web.

“Do More … With Someone Else” — Guest Editor Introduction to NISO ISQ Fall Issue

I’m pleased to announce that the Fall 2010 issue of NISO‘s International Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is done and available online to NISO members and ISQ subscribers. Print copies are scheduled to be mailed on December 28th. The individual issue is available for purchase (see the form link to on the issue homepage), and some of the articles are freely available on the NISO website. The theme for the issue is resource sharing, and I was privileged to be the guest editor for the issue. Included below is my introduction letter to whet your appetite for the full issue.

RDA-as-Service Only

At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is “Resource Description and Access” — the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you can look at it, too, during an open trial access period that runs through the end of August by signing up for it.) What really struck in me the demonstration, though, was that the site is as much a subscription to access the content of the RDA standard as it is a subscription to a delivery service with functions and features that go beyond the text of the standard itself. The text of the standard will be available in printed form, but one cannot get an electronic copy of the standard itself. This strikes me as sort of weird, so this blog post talks through that weirdness feeling.

Proposals for NISO Work Items: Physical Delivery Best Practices and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles

NISO voting members are currently considering two new work items: a statement of best practices for the physical delivery of library resources and formalizing the NLM journal article DTD de facto standards. The Physical Delivery and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles proposal documents are openly available for download.

Specifications for Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) published

ORE Logo The first production version of the Object Reuse and Exchange from the Open Archives Initiative was published today. In the words of the release announcement, ORE provides “the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their daily Web interaction: including multiple page Web documents, multiple format documents in institutional repositories, scholarly data sets, and online photo and music collections.”

“Object Reuse and Exchange” Beta Specifications Now Available

Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the release of the beta form of the ORE specifications yesterday. Here is the full text of their announcement:

Preserving Digital Video

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we would get a preservation-worthy digital copy from the producer/distributor and forego the physical version.

There is quite a lot written on preserving video, but I wanted to distill the requirements down into statements that vendors could reasonably provide today. I think these are pretty sound requirements, but I’m looking for feedback. In particular, I’m not quite sure how to handle the transfer of closed caption text from the publisher/distributor; suggestions are welcome.

OAI-ORE Open Meeting, April 4 2008, Johns Hopkins University

Copied from the press release announcing the U.K. Public Meeting for OAI/ORE.

Open Archives Initiative Announces U.K. Public Meeting on April 4, 2008 for European Release of Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications

Ithaca, NY and Los Alamos, NM, January 21, 2008 – As a result of initiatives in eScholarship, the format of scholarly communication, and the process that underlies it, are becoming increasingly expressive and complex. The resulting new artifacts of scholarship are aggregations composed of multiple media types, links to data, and to applications that allow interaction with that data. The success of these innovations depends on standard methods to identify, describe, and exchange these new forms scholarly communication.
http://dltj.org/tag/standards/
dltj.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
65846
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:7VRJAUBZJHSLOIF2KDVPQ2XPKPNUVAYS
<urn:uuid:286125d3-3535-452f-969a-288c322c8c05>
2013-05-18T12:21:46Z
50.16.230.151
sha1:STEZGMQF75SL5O2HUH3BAUNSSRRQ4OU2
<urn:uuid:492cb76c-16df-41a6-880b-563fb341295e>
http://dltj.org/tag/standards/
response
<urn:uuid:65c5df65-e935-415f-8ff0-c155ae5f0908>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf