Noteworthy

NISO Issues Journal Article Tag Suite for Trial Use

JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, NISO Z39.96-201x, has been issued by NISO as a new draft standard for trial use through September 30, 2011. JATS provides a common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content by preserving the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. The draft standard defines elements and attributes for describing the textual and graphical content of journal articles as well as some non-article material, such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews. The trial period will enable users to test the standard in real-life implementations and provide feedback. Once feedback is reviewed and NISO finalizes the standard, the final version will be submitted to ANSI for approval as an American National Standard.

The Journal Article Tag Suite standard is a continuation of the work started by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on the NLM Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite, commonly referred to as the NLM DTDs. The NLM DTDs were based on an article model that was being used in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)/NLM PubMed Central project to archive life science journals. The original PubMed Central article model was expanded in scope with support from Harvard University Libraries and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in collaboration with Inera, Inc. and Mulberry Technologies, Inc., resulting in 2003 in the full NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite. The Tag Suite had reached version 3.0 prior to initiation of the NISO standardization process; the NISO Z39.96-201x standard contains updates to version 3.0 of the NLM Tag Suite and is fully backwards compatible with it.

“As we looked at updating the NLM Tag Suite, we felt it was mature enough to take through NISO’s standardization process,” explained Jeffrey Beck, NCBI Technical Information Specialist at the National Library of Medicine and co-chair of the NISO JATS Working Group. “This standardization will bring awareness of the Tag Suite to a larger and more varied audience and provide opportunities for use in new applications.”

“Since the release of version 1, the Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite has been widely popular,” stated B. Tommie Usdin, President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc. and co-chair of the NISO JATS Working Group. “The format is being used to tag thousands of journals worldwide and is used for the journal archives at PubMed Central and Portico and by the online publisher HighWire Press. The Library of Congress and the British Library have announced their intention to use these models for archiving electronic content.”

The draft standard for trial use is available as both an online XML document and a downloadable PDF from the NISO website (www.niso.org/standards/z39-96/). An online commenting form is also available for trial users to provide feedback. Supporting documentation and schemas in DTD, RELAX NG, and W3C Schema formats are available at: jats.nlm.nih.gov/.

Counter Publishes Timetable and Objectives for Code of Practice Release 4

The fourth release of the COUNTER Code of Practice will combine the two existing codes for Journals and Databases and Books and Reference Works. The goal is to have a single, unified Code for all types of content, including multimedia works. The functionality of the XML reports and the use of SUSHI will be more fully developed and exploited. The implications of the PIRUS2 individual article usage statistics and the Journal Usage Factor projects will also be considered. The aim is to publish the definitive version of Release 4 in early 2012, with implementation by vendors required by December 31, 2013.

A timetable is provided to reach the goal of release in early 2012 and vendor implementation by December 2013. Both the existing Release 3 of the Code of Practice for Journals and Databases and the existing Release 1 of the Code of Practice for Books and Reference Works will remain valid until December 31, 2013.

For more information on COUNTER, visit: https://www.projectcounter.org/

For more information on PRIUS2, visit: http://www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/tiki-index.php

For more information on the Journal usage factor project, visit: www.uksg.org/usagefactors/

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published a new three-part standard, ISO 28560, Information and documentation – RFID in libraries, that specifies a model for the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for library items designed to ensure interoperability between libraries in exchange of library items with RFID tags. Part 1: Data elements and general guidelines for implementation specifies the data model, system data elements, and user data elements to be used on the RFID tags. Two encoding methods are defined. Part 2: Encoding of RFID data elements based on rules from ISO/IEC 15962 uses an object identifier structure to identify data elements. Part 3: Fixed length encoding deals with the encoding of a basic set of data elements in a fixed length format and the rest of the data elements in optional extension blocks. Parts 2 and 3 are mutually exclusive; the RFID tag would be encoded using only one of the two defined schemes.

To conform to the new ISO standard, NISO revised the 2008 recommended practice, RFID in U.S. Libraries, designed
to be the U.S. profile for implementation of the ISO 28560 international standard. The international standard offers two different encoding options and many optional data elements; the NISO recommended practice recommends the use of the ISO 28560 Part 2 encoding scheme and further refines the usage of data elements so that U.S. implementers can adopt a common approach. In addition to the data model, the Recommended Practice provides guidelines on security, privacy, vandalism, and migrating existing library RFID implementations to the new model. Use of these recommendations will ensure that U.S. libraries can procure tags and equipment from different vendors, merge collections containing different manufacturers’ tags, and, for the purposes of interlibrary loan, read the tags on items belonging to other libraries.

At the time of writing the NISO Recommended Practice (NISO RP-6-201x) was in the final week of a public comment period. It is expected to be published in June.

For more on the ISO standard, visit the ISO website (https://www.iso.org/home.html) and search 28560.

For the NISO Recommended Practice, visit the working group webpage: groups.niso.org/workrooms/rfid/

Four more publishers announced plans to bring their scholarly books online at JSTOR. This is the second wave of presses to join the Books at JSTOR initiative. The initial group included Chicago, Minnesota, North Carolina, Princeton, and Yale University Presses.

JSTOR initially began archiving and bringing online the back issues of leading journals in economics and history. The focus is similar with books. Publishers are being invited to join the initiative based on the relevance of their titles to the content on JSTOR and importance of their publications to scholars now and in the future.

The new publishers, together with the original group, will result in more than 15,000 front and back list titles being made available at JSTOR.

These presses are recognized as leaders in a wide range of disciplines including:

» History
» Sociology
» The Arts
» Business and economics
» Life sciences

In addition to offering the ability to search across journals and books, JSTOR includes more than 1 million book reviews and a vast number of citations dating back hundreds of years in the 1,400 journals it makes available. The books will be linked with this other content, creating a multitude of pathways through the literature.

Books will be available at JSTOR in spring 2012 and will be preserved in Portico, a digital preservation service for the scholarly community. Portico also announced that it will be preserving the entire collection of e-books from Oxford University Press from its Oxford Scholarship Online resource and Handbooks Online resource.

For more information on Books at JSTOR, visit: about.jstor.org/content- collections/books-jstor. For a list of e-book publishers participating in Portico, visit: www.portico.org/digital-preservation/who-participates-in-portico/

ProQuest Acquires ebrary

ProQuest through its acquisition of ebrary, a leader in providing e-books to libraries, will be adding over a quarter million e-books to their online content collection.

ProQuest plans continued investment in ebrary’s popular products and services for the academic, corporate, and public library markets including Academic CompleteTM the company’s flagship product. ProQuest will also expand ebrary’s selection of research tools and ability to support new e-book devices as well as broadening language coverage from its current support of major European languages to include Chinese, Arabic, and others. The company will also accelerate the indexing of e-book content on its own new platform where books offered by ebrary will be searchable along with ProQuest’s existing research content of books, journals, dissertations, newspapers, video, government documents, and more.

Since the acquisition announcement, ebrary has continued to add new content and features, including: popular fiction e-books for the Public library Complete product, a Topic of the Week program highlighting relevant e-books and offering free Title PreviewTM, new starter packs in 25 high-use subject areas, a patron-driven acquisition offering in conjunction with YBP library services, a usage-driven short-term loan model, and new German publishing partners along with a German-language interface.

For more information on ProQuest, visit: https://www.proquest.com/ for more information on ebrary, visit: https://www.proquest.com/products-services/ebooks/ebooks-main.html#whatsnewSection

Print Isn’t Dead, Says Bowker’s Annual Book Production Report

Bowker released its annual report on U.S. print book publishing, compiled from its books in Print® database. based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that despite the popularity of e-books, traditional U.S. print title output in 2010 increased 5%. Output of new titles and editions increased from 302,410 in 2009 to a projected 316,480 in 2010. The 5% increase comes on the heels of a 4% increase the previous year based on the final 2008-2009 figures.

The non-traditional sector continues its explosive growth, increasing 169% from 1,033,065 in 2009 to an amazing 2,776,260 in 2010. These books, marketed almost exclusively on the web, are largely on-demand titles produced by reprint houses specializing in public domain works and by presses catering to self-publishers and ”micro-niche” publications. in 2008, the production of non-traditional print-on-demand books surpassed traditional book publishing for the first time and since then, its growth has been staggering. now almost 8 times the output of traditional titles, the market is dominated by a handful of publishers.

In traditional publishing, SciTech continues to drive growth. Fiction, which is still the largest category (nearly 15% of the total) dropped 3% from 2009, continuing a decline from peak output in 2007.

For the complete report, visit: www.bowker.com/index.php/press-releases/633-print-isnt-dead-says-bowkers-annual-book-production-report

Project MUSE and UPEC Partner to Order E-books Through the University Press Content Consortium

Project MUSE, an online platform initiated for humanities and social sciences e-journals, is further expanding into e-books with a newly formed partnership with the University Press e-Book Consortium (UPeC) to launch the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC). MUSE had previously announced their own Project MUSE Editions e-book program, but the new UPCC will replace that program.

The UPCC project is expected to offer thousands of digital books from a significant number of major university presses and related scholarly publishers, beginning in January 2012. E-books from 2010 and 2011 will be available immediately in January 2012 and archival backlists are also being developed. A beta platform including sample book content, and a new integrated search interface, will launch late this summer for review and feedback.

Books in the UPCC Collections will be fully integrated in the MUSE platform; users will be able to search across combined book and journal content, or limit searches by content type. Digital books will be in PDF format, searchable and retrievable to the chapter level, and will be released electronically at the same time the print book is released. Unlimited simultaneous usage of book content will be allowed, with no DRM and no restrictions on printing or downloading. Institutional purchasers of MUSE/UPCC book collections will receive ownership and perpetual access rights for books purchased. Free MARC records will be provided for all books and COUNTER-compliant usage statistics will be available.

For more information about UPCC and a list of publishers committed to provide e-books, visit: muse.jhu.edu/about/new/ ebook_collections.html

Duke Releases Results of Library E-book Acquisition Survey

Duke University Press has published the results of an online survey regarding e-book acquisition by libraries. The survey link was sent to the Press librarian contacts, the LibLicense and ERIL listservs, and to their Twitter feed, resulting in 265 respondents.

Libraries are utilizing more than one acquisition strategy at the current time with 67% subscribing to aggregated collections from multiple publishers, 64% subscribing to single publisher collections, and 27% using patron-driven acquisition. budgets are shifting somewhat: 53% indicated an increase in their budget for e-books. many libraries are purchasing at least some portion of e-books in print format as well: 25% for highly-used titles; 19% for particular disciplines; 44% if requested by faculty or librarian; and 10% if the print versions are heavily discounted. The top three ranked criteria for selecting e-books are the quality of the content (87%), pricing (84%), and patron or faculty request (62%). The content platform at 55% and digital rights management (dRm) at 42% were the next highest reasons. in a separate question, 25% of respondents indicated that dRm restrictions were never acceptable. 70% of respondents do not provide patrons with e-book readers. of those who do, kindle and iPad were the top two e-readers offered.

Numerous write-in comments from respondents are included in the full survey report; they highlight the many issues that libraries are struggling with including pricing models, dRm, format and e-reader device variability, and the availability of cataloging records.

The survey report is available at: associationofsubscriptionagentsintermediaries. cmail5.com/t/r/l/jrlyjtt/ntyykgm/jj/

Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections Report Recommends Path Forward

The Cloud Library project—jointly designed and executed by OCLC Research, the HathiTrust, New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, and the Research Collections Access & Preservation (ReCAP) consortium, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—has concluded after their year-long study of data from the HathiTrust, ReCAP, and WorldCat that:

There is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations.

While the study confirms that academic libraries could have substantial cost savings by outsourcing the management of their redundant low-use materials, the authors acknowledged that “the organizational change required to achieve these gains is likely to be substantial and challenging to implement.” Particular obstacles identified were that: less than 20% of works are in the public domain, service providers will need to collaborate to obtain needed coverage, and better discovery and delivery are needed. The long-awaited Google Book Settlement is also an issue for determining how to license access to a shared e-collection.

If the HathiTrust Digital Library continues its current growth rate, the study projected that over 60% of ARL Libraries’ retrospective print collections will be in the repository by June 2014. HathiTrust doubled in size just during the 12 months of the study and is already larger than the average ARL library. Over 95% of the titles in the repository are books.

An analysis of one partner in the study, New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, found that approximately 30% of the library’s titles were in HathiTrust, which represents 44,000 linear feet of library shelving that could potentially be removed. (Although even in the best of situations, a total removal of all of these titles is unlikely.) Library space is not the only savings identified. A high- density storage service like ReCAP is estimated to cost $0.86 per volume to manage compared to $4.26 in an on-site library collection.

The study report recommends several strategies that can be taken to advance the vision of a shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities and notes that: “This work will be challenging and deserves external support and endorsement by library leadership organizations and funders.”

The complete report is available at: https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2011/2011-01.pdf