NISO Launches New Projects to Develop Standards for Bibliographic
Vocabulary Exchange -- Call for participants
From:
"NISO" <niso-announce_at_niso.org>
The voting members of the National Information Standards Organization
(NISO) have approved three new projects to develop standards to better
support exchange and interoperability of bibliographic data. These
projects were identified as high priorities in NISOs Bibliographic
Roadmap pre-standards initiative, which was funded by a grant from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of that project was to
collectively determine the needs and requirements of the new
bibliographic framework in a global, networked information environment
and to develop community consensus for a roadmap of activities needed in
this space. Following the issuance of the Bibliographic Roadmap final
report in April 2014, NISOs Content and Collection Management (CCM)
Topic Committee evaluated the recommendations and prepared a new work
item proposal focusing on three of the top prioritized areas: Vocabulary
policies on use and reuse, Vocabulary documentation, and Vocabulary
preservation requirements.
Differences in vocabularies and the communities that manage them are
often seen to be a hurdle to interoperability, explains Marti Heyman,
Executive Director, Metadata Standards and Services at Cengage Learning,
and Co-Chair of the CCM Topic Committee. Different vocabularies also
present challenges because quality control, maintenance strategies, and
usage policies vary across the sets. Provenance of vocabulary data is
critical to understand the management needs of aggregated data as it
ages and changes.
One barrier to vocabulary exchange and interoperability is the lack of
policies relevant to use and re-use of vocabularies by organizations
other than the owner or maintainer of the vocabulary, states Betty
Landesman, Head of Technical Services and Content Management at
University of Baltimore, Langsdale Library, and Co-Chair of the CCM
Topic Committee. Documentation of vocabularies is also important for
their users, and a minimum set of information to be documented should be
defined. Many vocabularies are developed under a short-term funded
project and the long-term sustainability and preservation of the
vocabulary is endangered when the project funding ends. Pathways forward
for managing and supporting such orphan vocabularies need to be defined.
We are looking for a diversity of participants in these projects beyond
just libraries, said Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Program Director.
In addition to libraries involved in the bibliographic framework design
and implementation, we are encouraging organizations such as library
system vendors, abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, and developers
or users of standardized vocabularies and metadata for describing
resources to volunteer their experts to help develop these new standards.
The approved proposal for the vocabulary projects and the final report
from the Bibliographic Roadmap project are available on the NISO website
at: www.niso.org/topics/tl/BibliographicRoadmap/
<http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/BibliographicRoadmap/>. Anyone interested
in participating on one of the vocabulary working groups should use the
online contact form (www.niso.org/contact/
<http://www.niso.org/contact/>) and indicate in which of the three
projects you are interested.
Cynthia Hodgson
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
chodgson_at_niso.org <mailto:chodgson_at_niso.org>
301-654-2512
Received on Fri Mar 20 2015 - 03:01:42 EDT