LaTes, 'Standard Fare', LITA Newsletter v14n04 URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/lita/lita-v14n04-lates-standard [v14n4.stanfare litanews] ----------------- Standard Fare Pierre Badin LaTes, VI New Orleans was again a very active ALA Annual Conference for LITA's Technical Standards for Library Automation Committee (TESLA). In addi- tion to the two regular committee meetings, TESLA sponsored a program "Managing the Impact of Z39.50 on Your Library" (see elsewhere in this issue). This completes the trilogy of TESLA programs on the subject of Z39.50 that started at last ALA in San Francisco and continued at the National Conference in Denver. The turnout of more than 500 people for this program, who stayed despite inadequate room size for this crowd, attested to the continued timeliness of the topic! Committee Membership Sylvia Carson, TESLA Chair, announced several membership changes as of the end of the conference. At the time of the TESLA meetings, it was not known who had been appointed as new members or reappointed for an- other term; it was later learned that Mark Hinnebusch will be the new TESLA Chair. Joan Aliprand, Sylvia Cornell, Douglas Kranch, Leslie Pearse and Beth Sandore will be ongoing members next year. Leaving TESLA after this conference were Sylvia Carson, Betty Landesman and Rose Saenz; as outgoing members, they were thanked for the contribu- tions to the Committee. Joan Aliprand succeeds Betty Landesman as edi- tor of "Standard Fare." NISO-L There was a great deal of discussion on the present and future of NISO- L. Niso-l@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu was established in April 1993 to provide news of the activities of standards committees and to announce the bal- loting and publication of new and revised standards. However, it has shown little activity to date. NISO-L is currently a read-only mail distributor, but it could if desired be turned into a true listserv so people could ask questions and send comments on standards. It would be desirable for subscribers to include NISO committee chairs and mem- bers, TESLA and AVIAC members, voting members of NISO and members of and liaisons to MARBI. Ways that TESLA could assist with the manage- ment of the listserv were discussed. BISAC and SISAC Sandy Paul gave her regular status report on the activities of the Book Industry Systems Advisory Committee (BISAC) and the Serials Indus- try Systems Advisory Committee (SISAC). The Book Industry Study Group, parent organization to both Advisory Committees, cosponsored an EDI Im- plementation Workshop for ILS vendors on Friday, June 25, 1993. While 24 vendor representatives had responded to the invitation, 60 actually came. Attendees were provided with a list of the primary data elements a serials system will need to capture in order to pass back and forth in EDI; a list of all data elements (required and otherwise) in BISAC X12 formats; and a new edition of the SISAC explanation of the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (defined by the NISO Z39.56-1991 standard) compared with the SISAC barcode. BISAC has published X12 guidelines including a number of formats. The combination Advance Ship Notice and Invoice is being worked on. The use of the SAN in barcodes on cartons has caused people to want to examine it, and BISAC is working with European groups to explore the internationalization of the SAN. It was announced that at the SISAC meeting on June 26 there would be discussion of machine-readable ta- bles of contents and the possibility of using a two-dimensional bar- code for table of contents scanning. Kluwer has tables of contents available via FTP. A fixed plan for X12 migration to EDIFACT should be in place by the October meeting, and the last set of X12 standards will be sent to ANSI in 1997. The differences between X12 and EDIFACT are fewer than their similarities. A group called EDItEUR is currently developing book and serial formats in EDIFACT. Unicode Joan Aliprand gave an update on Unicode. As Unicode is being imple- mented in computer systems, vendors will be mapping MARC into Unicode and out again; it is therefore important for mapping to be done be- tween the current MARC character sets and Unicode. Many different groups have worked on character sets: MARBI has before it a proposal to add some characters to the ALA character set; LC runs the USMARC character sets; NISO and TC46 have done work on character sets; the ALA character set is still for sale by ALA. There are a few characters that are not contained in Unicode, par- ticularly those with two "halves" bound together to form a single char- acter representation, e.g., some letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. Some characters are represented several times in different character sets (e.g., a number in Hebrew and a number in Cyrillic); Unicode con- tains the character only once. There were some questions on the ease of mapping ALA characters to Unicode. The Unicode Consortium is mostly composed of computer manufacturers. TESLA will propose that a commit- tee be formed to develop a NISO standard for mapping library character sets to Unicode, and underscored the necessity for LC and system ven- dors to be involved as they will have to write to and support the standard. Program Planning While TESLA had worked very hard to put on three programs in the space of a year, and had intended to focus on other things for a while, the enormous success of the Z39.50 efforts led to discussion of the possi- bility of continued program planning. It was agreed that LAMA cospon- sorship was a key to the crowd that attended the latest program, and LAMA should be approached for active involvement in the design of the next program. Possible topics were mentioned: standards--what are they for, and what do we need to know about them to get to where we want to be in five years; format integration; X12; more on Z39.50; interoper- ability and funding issues in public libraries. It was agreed that TESLA would plan to do a program in Miami in 1994. The program will be finalized at Midwinter in Los Angeles. Input will be sought through in- quiry on listservs such as PACS-L, LIBADMIN and PUBLIB. 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