NISO Newsline

October 2004

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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).

"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).

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).

"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).

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).

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).

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).

"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).

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