NISO Announces Initial Successes in Implementation of Strategic Plan
BETHESDA, MD - January 18, 2007 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has issued a report to members detailing significant progress during 2006 in the areas of strategic direction, standards development, a body of recommended practices, seminars, and new initiatives.
Staff changes constituted one of the most visible ways the Board began to implement NISO's new Strategic Plan, developed with the assistance of an eleven-member Blue Ribbon Panel and funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Todd Carpenter was appointed Managing Director in September; Karen Wetzel will serve as the first Standards Program Manager, effective January 22. Other administrative moves were governance changes and the development of a Strategic Framework to reflect imperatives in the Strategic Plan, as well as a remodeled Committee Structure to enable launching Architecture and Topic Committees in early 2007.
New, reaffirmed and draft standards included Standard Address Number (SAN) for the Publishing Industry (reaffirmed ANSI/NISO Z39.43-1993 [R2006]); Holdings Statements for Bibliographic Items (revision of ANSI/NISO Z39.71-2006); the new Data Dictionary -- Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (ANSI/NISO Z39.87-2006); and a draft standard for trial use, The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol, which was issued September 20, 2006 as Z39.93-200x.
Published in July 2006, Best Practices for Designing Web Services in the Library Context was the first of NISO's new series of Recommended Practice publications. These documents are intended to provide guidance in emerging areas where formalized standards may inhibit innovation. A revision of the NISO Metasearch XML Gateway Implementers Guide followed a month later.
In addition to the plethora or SUSHI activities, NISO also launched significant efforts in the areas of license expression, versions of journal articles, alternative business practices relating to e-resources, and RFID in libraries.
The three SUSHI web seminars -- NISO's first web seminars ever -- kicked off the education program for the year, with "Introduction to SUSHI" (May 17) and "SUSHI: The Technology Unveiled" (May 24) drawing capacity audiences. Managing Electronic Collections: Strategies from Content to User (September 28-30 in Denver, Colorado) and Discovery to Delivery: Solutions to Put the Content Where Your Users Are (November 2-3 at the National Agricultural Library) were both sold-out events. Audio of Managing Electronic Collections and video of Discovery to Delivery are available on the NISO website.
About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators and other organizations that support learning, research and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of an information standard. NISO (www.niso.org) is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org.