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NISO Newsline


October 2004 

________________________________

size=2 width="100%" align=center> 

Welcome to the first issue of NISO's Newsline, a monthly alert featuring
news about NISO's activities and crisp, timely reports on significant
developments, events, and trends in the information standards world.

You'll see NISO Newsline in your in-box the first Wednesday of each
month. Your feedback is encouraged and appreciated. To help us reach a
broad audience please forward NISO's Newsline to your staff, colleagues,
committee members, and others in your network who need to know about
standards. Remember -- we all have a role in framing the standards
solutions.

Pat Harris
Executive Director
NISO 

________________________________


NISO REPORTS


NISO Takes Part in Patent-Focused Seminar 
Blue Ribbon Panel Will Aid NISO Planning
Now Available: Understanding Metadata
Metasearch Update
What's New in NISO Standards


FROM THE MEDIA


"European Conference on Digital Libraries" 
"Librarians Go Digital" 
"Metadata Leadership" 
"Gearing Up for Digital-Era Preservation" 
"XML: Too Much of a Good Thing?" 
"IPTC Updates About Its News Exchange Standards at IfraExpo 2004" 
"Museums, Libraries and Archives Council UK Ratifies Commitment to
Global Internet Standards" 
"Hot Conference, Cool Technology" 
"Digital Pack Rats" 

________________________________


NISO REPORTS


NISO Takes Part in Patent-Focused Seminar 

On September 16, NISO participated in an invitation-only event that
explored the hazards of including patent-protected intellectual property
(IP) in standards. "The Future of Standards Setting" brought together
top IP attorneys from the corporate world (including Microsoft and HP)
and standards developers to see what lessons can be learned from recent
high-profile IP cases. (Read More
<http://www.niso.org/news/newsline/#patent> ) 

Blue Ribbon Panel Will Aid NISO Planning 

With a charter to evaluate NISO's progress, challenges, and
opportunities, eleven experts from industry, academia, and the library
community have accepted seats on NISO's Blue Ribbon Panel. The Panel
will play a central role in the strategic planning initiative that
NISO's Board of Directors launched in May 2004. The Mellon Foundation
has provided funding to support the Panel, which will provide a formal
report-open for public review and comment-later this year.(Read More
<http://www.niso.org/news/newsline/#panel> ) 

Now Available: Understanding Metadata 

Understanding Metadata, an introduction to metadata that includes an
overview of leading metadata contenders and examples of practical
applications, is available as a free download from NISO
(www.niso.org/standards/resources/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf). The
publication covers a range of fundamentals, from a definition of
metadata and descriptions of the types of metadata, to creating metadata
and future directions. (Read More
<http://www.niso.org/news/newsline/#metadata> ) 

Metasearch Update 

Through NISO's Metasearch Initiative, librarians, content providers,
middleware vendors, and publishers are working on standards to improve
web searching. The vast majority of quality data (whether popular
content from newspapers and magazines, or scholarly research material
content available in journals and through abstract services) is only
available via leased access to proprietary Web interfaces. (Read More
<http://www.niso.org/news/newsline/#metasearch> ) 

What's New in NISO Standards 

A Question/Answer Transaction Protocol that supports Q&A between library
patrons and reference sources has been released for a trial use through
April 5, 2005. The Protocol defines a method and structure for data
exchange between digital reference service domains. This new standard
supports digital reference services, a new and rapidly growing extension
of the traditional reference assistance, a mainstay of library
operations. All interested parties are invited to review the Protocol
and participate as an Implementer. Following the trial use period the
comments and experiences of the implementer community will be considered
in finalizing the Protocol for consideration as a NISO standard. For
more information, go to www.niso.org/committees/net-ref-protocol.html
(Read More <http://www.niso.org/news/newsline/#new> ) 

________________________________


FROM THE MEDIA


"European Conference on Digital Libraries" 
Managing Information News (09/13/04) 

ECDL 2004, the eighth European Conference on Digital Libraries, was held
Sept. 12-17, 2004, at the University of Bath. The gathering offered
presentations, in addition to tutorials and demonstrations, on digital
libraries and associated technical, organizational, and social issues.
Brian Kelly of UKOLN was scheduled to address the challenges of
interoperability, when relying on open standards, in a presentation of
his paper, "Interoperable Digital Library Programs? We Must have QA!"
Kelly said, "Although such principles are widely accepted in the digital
library community, in practice appropriate standards and best practices
are not always used." He gave reasons for this failure and a solution
that makes use of QA principles. UKOLN assistant director Andy Powell
headed "Encoding Dublin Core Metadata in XHTML, XML, and RDF," and
officials from JISC Development offered a demonstration of "Tailoring
the Web for Teaching and Learning." Other projects funded by JISC that
were presented at ECDL included "The Institutional Repository Route to
Open Access: Implications for Its Evolution," by Dr. Jessie Hey of the
School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of
Southampton and Pauline Simpson of the University of Southampton
Libraries. (www.managinginformation.com). 

________________________________

"Librarians Go Digital" 
News 8 Austin (09/10/04) Bordelon, Jennifer 

The University of Texas School of Information plans to use two grants
totaling more than $1 million to train library and information
professionals in digital preservation. Over the past decade, more
reference information has gone digital and a high percentage of
information today is even born digitally. "But there has not been a
whole lot of planning to preserve digital records," acknowledges Mary
Lynn Rice-Lively, associate dean of the School of Information.
Information will be easier to find, once it has been catalogued in the
digital world. Although it is currently easier to return results, they
are not always what people are looking for. "One thing that we really
need to work on is standards because now that everything is going
digital there are a lot of unknowns," says Lab Peterek, a graduate
student. (www.news8austin.com <http://www.news8austin.com/> ). 

________________________________

"Metadata Leadership" 
Library Journal (08/15/04) P. 27; Tennant, Roy 

Libraries will have to embrace bibliographic records encoded with
different standards and emerging specs such as Dublin Core, the Metadata
Object Description Schema (MODS), and VRA Core, or become even more
marginalized. The number of useful items online without MARC cataloging
now reaches into the millions, and may never be catalogued in MARC.
Catalogers can plan a key role in accommodating records not catalogued
in MARC or AACR2 because they understand that the important metadata
issues of granularity, accuracy, authority control, and controlled
vocabularies remain the same. Rebecca Guenther at the Library of
Congress has helped lead the way by being involved in the Dublin Core
effort, and also by helping to pioneer the MODS. And some library
schools are updating their curricula and creating new classes to address
all forms of biographical metadata. However, libraries need to stress
the importance of metadata expertise so that catalogers long out of
school will be motivated to revamp their skills. The National
Information Standards Organization offers the superb paper
"Understanding Metadata," which should help get library staff up to
speed. (www.libraryjournal.com <http://www.libraryjournal.com/> ). 

NISO Note: "Understanding Metadata" can be downloaded for free from the
NISO website at http://www.niso.org/index.html 

________________________________

"Gearing Up for Digital-Era Preservation" 
IST Results (09/02/04) 

The importance of digitally preserving Europe's cultural and scientific
heritage will be highlighted at an October workshop in Bern,
Switzerland, hosted by the IST program's Erpanet project. Underlying
Erpanet is the acknowledgment that Europe must commit more time,
financial resources, and effort to dealing with digital preservation,
and that this effort must be ratcheted up because the definition of
digital preservation has expanded to include those who manage electronic
records, not just traditional archivists and record managers. The
three-year project, executed between Italian, Dutch, and Swiss partners,
has studied experience, policies, and stratagems devised by others in
the field of digital preservation; among Erpanet's accomplishments is
the erpaDirectory, which details approximately 100 European programs,
while Erpanet coordinator Peter McKinney also lauds the project's 60
case studies. "They are unique for the preservation community, looking
not only at cultural heritage but also software and the way institutions
such as banks plan to keep records in the future," he notes. Though more
and more data is being rendered digitally, McKinney explains that "the
problem is how we get people to use these standard formats--and whether
they will continue to be standard in future." Software and hardware's
ever-increasing speed of change is another challenging factor. The
Erpanet coordinator reports that the project is cultivating a community
of stakeholders, while Erpanet-distributed guidance documents on best
practices and other advisories should maintain their usefulness for
several years. (istresults.cordis.lu <http://istresults.cordis.lu/> ). 

________________________________

"XML: Too Much of a Good Thing?" 
CNet (09/07/04) Becker, David 

In the six years since the main XML specification was created, hundreds
of derivative schemas and dialects have emerged to serve interests
ranging from poultry farming to cave exploration. Although some worry
that the proliferation of XML formats could lead to compatibility
problems, XML co-inventor Tim Bray says the phenomenon is evidence of
XML's success, explaining that the original idea was to create a
language from which developers could easily craft other languages. XML
book author John Simpson, who has created his own schema for cataloging
"B" movies, says XML is more accurately described as a grammar than a
language itself, and that any XML-based system can be easily tweaked to
understand other XML dialects; "The fact there are different standards
is immaterial...it's almost trivial to get it from one dialect into
another," he says. XML has become the foundation for a growing number of
major IT projects, including the Indigo communications subsystem
Microsoft plans to build into the Longhorn operating system and
services-oriented architecture frameworks touted by systems integrators.
XML's ability to describe complex data easily over the Internet is a
boon to numerous industries, such as farmers, food processors, and
grocers, who use the Meat and Poultry XML format to share information
about meat quality, cut, and expiration. Industry coordinator Blake
Ashby says speedier data sharing means less time manually checking
information and stock-keeping, and fresher product. Still, many groups
struggle with competing XML standards that analyst Ron Schmelzer warns
could confuse and burden small businesses, for example. Eventually,
these competing standards will be consolidated according to market
forces, at which point the basic XML framework will make integration
easy. (news.com.com <http://news.com.com/> ). 

NISO Note: All useful standards undergo "growing pains" as
implementations get going, making it even more important for standards
developers to tie the community together. 

________________________________

"IPTC Updates About Its News Exchange Standards at IfraExpo 2004" 
XMLMania.com (09/08/04) 

IPTC plans to present the latest developments involving NITF, NewsML,
Newscodes, and other specialized areas such as sports and election
results during an afternoon session on Oct. 11, 2004, at IfraExpo 2004
in Amsterdam. The Windsor, England-based consortium of major news
agencies, publishers, and industry vendors will discuss the news
exchange and XML-based standards. IPTC also will announce that the
standards for news photo metadata will be supported by Adobe Photoshop
CS and Adobe's XMP metadata framework. "We had a successful information
session at Nexpo 2004 in Washington, so it seems natural to bring news
of IPTC's work to the premier newspaper technology forum in Europe,"
says Walter Baranger of The New York Times. "For many Ifra members, this
is the easiest way to meet and talk to people who make IPTC's widely
known standards." Ifra will hold its annual autumn meeting in Amsterdam
a week before the October gathering, and will discuss the development of
NewsML 2 and NewsCodes, the standard taxonomies for news metadata.
(www.xmlmania.com <http://www.xmlmania.com/> ). 

NISO Note: NISO is monitoring the IPTC's work to set standards for the
interchange of news data as this work may be the basis for the standards
needed to encode the historical newspaper collections that are going
digital. 

________________________________

"Museums, Libraries and Archives Council UK Ratifies Commitment to
Global Internet Standards" 
M2 PressWIRE (08/24/04) 

The United Kingdom has become officially involved in the continued
development of the Dublin Core, the widely used international standard
for metadata, the words that describe the content of Web pages. The
Museums, Libraries, and Archives Council (MLA) and Joint Information
Systems Committee (JISC) have signed on to the Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative, and will represent U.K. public sector institutions. The
United Kingdom is among the seven national governments that have adopted
Dublin Core, which has participants in 25 countries and has been
translated in 25 languages. Dublin Core is named after the location of
its initial development in Dublin, Ohio. UK OLN, the digital information
management center at the University of Bath, will serve as adviser on
the implementation and technical development of the Dublin Core
standard. MLA Chief Executive Chris Batt says signing the agreement is
important for several reasons. "First of all, it enables those
organizations at the cutting edge of Internet development to influence
the development of the important Dublin Core standard and to ensure the
needs of the U.K.'s rich creative knowledge economy is well served
globally," says Batt. "Second, the fact that MLA and JISC have agreed to
share this program recognizes the convergence that is increasingly
possible in a networked world." (www.m2presswire.com
<http://www.m2presswire.com/> ). 

NISO Note: The Dublin Core aka NISO Z39.85 (or ISO 15836) can be
downloaded from the NISO website at
http://www.niso.org/standards/index.html 

________________________________

"Hot Conference, Cool Technology" 
American Libraries (08/04) Vol. 35, No. 7, P. 68; Pace, Andrew K. 

The American Library Association's Annual Conference featured a number
of new library technologies that generally enhance librarians' ability
to manage resources. Electronic resources management (ERM) systems
received the most coverage, allowing libraries to more efficiently
manage their third-party licensed content, including electronic
databases and journals, but the category is still new and vendors did
not offer a good conceptual definition. Digital asset management (DAM)
allow libraries to manage their local collections and this year's
products focused on supporting newer standards such as XML, the Open
Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), Metadata
Encoding and Transmission Standards (METS), and JPEG2000. MuseGlobal, Ex
Libris, WebFeat, and other firms offered a number of "connecter files"
that put off the need for a newer standard that lowers the bar for
non-Z39.50 search broadcasts. RFID is perhaps the most rapidly maturing
technology, offering libraries unprecedented inventory-control and
customer service opportunities. By fitting collections with the small
radio tags, libraries could enable self-checkout and more efficient item
routing for shelving items, for example. Biblioteca, Checkpoint, 3M, and
VTLS are in the forefront of this market, which should grow as RFID chip
prices fall from the current 60 cents to 90 cents per chip. (www.ala.org
<http://www.ala.org/> ). 

________________________________

"Digital Pack Rats" 
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (08/27/04) P. 1F; Fernandez, Don 

Evolving technology standards will be the ultimate filter to help weed
out old and unneeded files, says Carnegie Mellon University Data Storage
Systems Center head Ed Schlesinger. As a result of today's information
explosion, unorganized stores of MP3s, digital video, and images are
breaking down the efficiency and order technology was supposed to bring;
peripheral devices such as digital cameras, set-top television
recorders, and MP3 players encourage computer users to store increasing
amounts of data. Schlesinger says, "These digital pack rats haven't
thought about what they're going to do with this 10 years from now."
University of California at Berkeley professor Peter Lyman is conducting
a study of personal media consumption at the School of Information
Management and Systems. "It's like an infinite attic, and we're filling
it," he says of people's proclivity to save emails, images, and other
files on their computers. National Association of Professional
Organizers President Barry Izsak recently added electronic organizing to
the list of services he performs. The ease of saving files causes people
to save more than they need, he says. Storage technology advances will
soon allow CD-size discs to hold small portraits of every person on the
planet, says Carnegie Mellon University Data Storage Systems Center head
Ed Schlesinger. Companies are capitalizing on the explosion of stored
digital files, such as Kodak, which is setting up 25,000 kiosks
nationwide where digital camera users can print images. Moxi is a device
that employs software to choose and organize television programming and
other multimedia. Georgia Tech offers the SMARTech digital repository
that automatically refreshes and updates users' data to the latest
formats. (www.ajc.com <http://www.ajc.com/> ). 

________________________________

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NISO Newsline is an executive summary of noteworthy articles pertaining
to Information Standards and is distributed to the NISO community each
month.

Our editorial staff monitors nearly 7,000 newspapers, business
publications, Web sites, national and international wire services, and
other periodicals and summarizes significant articles into an
easy-to-read summary.

For more information or to provide feedback, please contact:

Pat Harris
Executive Director
National Information Standards Organization
4733 Bethesda Avenue, Suite 300
Bethesda, MD 20814
301-654-2512

________________________________

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