NISO has released KBART: Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (NISO RP-9-2010).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

UKSG and NISO are pleased to announce the first report by the KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools) Working Group, a joint initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain. The KBART Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2010) contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.

The KBART Recommended Practice, a report from Phase I of the KBART project, provides all parties in the information supply chain with straightforward guidance about the role of metadata within the OpenURL linking standard, and recommends data formatting and exchange guidelines for publishers, aggregators, agents, technology vendors, and librarians to adhere to when exchanging information about their respective content holdings.

A near-final draft of the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) has been made available for error-checking review.

Here's an excerpt:

This document is a technical Recommendation for use in developing a broader consensus on what is required for an archive to provide permanent, or indefinite long-term, preservation of digital information.

This Recommendation establishes a common framework of terms and concepts which comprise an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). It allows existing and future archives to be more meaningfully compared and contrasted. It provides a basis for further standardization within an archival context and it should promote greater vendor awareness of, and support of, archival requirements.

The Society for Scholarly Publishing has published a profile of Todd Carpenter, who is the Managing Director of the National Information Standards Organization.

Here's an excerpt:

[SSP] Where do you see scholarly communications heading, and what new directions interest you most?

[Carpenter] I see the following as critical areas that are in most desperate need of attention in our community: discovery, license and ownership questions, and preservation. On the questions of discovery, thanks to Google, we seem to have forgotten all of the advances in organization that libraries have developed over decades in finding information and have turned to rely solely on keyword searching. This works well enough 80% of the time. The problem is that people have become satisfied with the 80% results that Google returns in fractions of a second, not understanding that there may be something critical in that remaining 20%. Incorporating into search classification structures, ontologies, and improved semantics—all common under different guises in the print world—is a critical component to ensuring that ALL relevant content is visible to users. . . .

The directions that interest me most include ebooks and display technology, identification of items, people and content, and copyright. The next transformation of our industry will likely be in how people access digital content—moving away from the desktop to something that more resembles the experience of using a book. Much of this will depend on developments with display technology, digital ink, and battery power. How people interact with content is going to come down to better solutions for identification of people and content. Control of access to content will be driven by advances in identity management. This likely won't come out of the publishing world (more likely banking or government), but will have incredible ramifications on how scholarship and all content is distributed. Finally, sharing and reuse of content is not likely to be contained by the current rules for copyright. Restructuring those rules to acknowledge and allow what most people want to do with content will be a key question worth watching if copyright is to continue to have any respect by end-users of content.

NISO will form a single sign-on authentication working group.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

NISO is pleased to announce the approval by the NISO Voting Members of a new work item to focus on perfecting single-sign-on (SSO) authentication to achieve seamless item-level linking in a networked information environment. A new working group will be formed under the auspices of NISO's Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee to create one or more recommended practices that will explore practical solutions for improving the success of SSO authentication technologies and to promote the adoption of one or more of these solutions to make the access improvements a reality.

This work item is the outcome of NISO's new Chair's Initiative, an annual project of the chair of NISO's Board of Directors. NISO's current Chair, Oliver Pesch (Chief Strategist, EBSCO Information Services), has identified single-sign-on authentication as an area that would benefit greatly from study and development within NISO, with a focus on a solution that will allow a content site to know which authentication method to use without special login URLs in order to provide a seamless experience for the user. Possible solutions include providing a generic mechanism for passing the authentication method from site to site; use of cookies to remember the authentication method that was used the last time the site was accessed by that computer; and/or providing a mechanism to discover if the user has an active session for one of the common SSO authentication methods. "By developing recommended practices that will help make the SSO environment work better (smarter)," said Pesch, "libraries and information providers will improve the ability for users to successfully and seamlessly access the content to which they are entitled."

DRAFT: TEI Text Encoding in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices is now available for comment until May 6, 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the comment survey:

The revised "TEI Text Encoding in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices," currently in draft form, contain updated versions of the widely adopted encoding 'levels'—from fully automated conversion to content analysis and scholarly encoding. They also contain a substantially revised section on the TEI Header, designed to support interoperability between text collections and the use of complementary metadata schemas such as MARC and METS. The new Guidelines also reflect an organizational shift. Originally authored by the DLF-sponsored TEI Task Force, the current revision work is a partnership between members of the Task Force and the TEI Libraries SIG. As a result of this partnership, responsibility for the Guidelines will migrate to the SIG, allowing closer work with the TEI Consortium as a whole and a stronger basis for advocating for the needs of libraries in future TEI releases.

OECD has released We Need Publishing Standards for Datasets and Data Tables.

Here's an excerpt:

Datasets are a significant part of the scholarly record and are being published more and more frequently, either formally or informally. Many publishers are beginning to link to them from their journals and authors are trying to cite them in their articles. Librarians would like a way to manage them alongside other publications. In short, they need to be integrated into the scholarly information system so that authors, readers and librarians can use, find and manage them as easily as they do working papers, journal articles and books.

In this paper, OECD is proposing some standards for citing and bibliographic management of datasets and data tables. OECD is currently building a new online publishing platform which will host working papers, journals, books, tables and datasets. Due to be launched in mid-2009, this platform will use the standards proposed above. Librarians will be offered MARC 21 records for datasets, alongside records for OECD books and periodicals. Users of the platform will be invited to download citations for datasets and tables in a form compatible with popular bibliographic management systems. All the DOIs for the datasets and tables will be deposited with CrossRef, ready for other publishers to use.

Bill McCoy, General Manager of ePublishing Business at Adobe Systems, has announced the release of a draft version of the Open Publication Distribution System.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Stanza, the leading iPhone eBook software, includes an excellent online catalog system that enables users to seamlessly acquire free and commercial content from within the application. The Lexcycle team built this system in an open, extensible manner using Atom. Adobe and Lexcycle have been working together on Adobe PDF and EPUB eBook support, and now we are deepening that collaboration in working together, along with the Internet Archive and others, to establish an open architecture enabling widespread discovery, description, and access of book and other published material on the open web. The Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) is a generalization of the Atom approach used by Stanza's online catalog. I'm grateful to the Lexcycle team as well as my friend and colleague Peter Brantley for their efforts on behalf of open access and interoperability.

Read more about it at “Adobe Teams Up With Stanza to Create Open EBook Catalog Standard.”

NISO has released the Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE) Protocol (Z39.95-200x) as a Draft Standard for Trial Use.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The CORE draft standard defines an XML schema to facilitate the exchange of financial information related to the acquisition of library resources between systems, such as an ILS and an ERMS. The document was approved on March 31, 2009 by the Business Information Topic Committee, which provides oversight to the CORE Working Group.

The CORE standard is being issued for a one-year trial use period, to run from April 1, 2009 through March 31, 2010. Following the DFSTU phase will be an evaluation and correction period before final publication.

"I am very pleased that CORE is available for trial use after just eight months' time. The CORE Working Group has produced a standard that provides a simple and effective solution to the problem of exchanging cost-related data from one system to another," commented Todd Carpenter, NISO's Managing Director.

JHOVE2 Functional Requirements version 1.3 has been released. (Thanks to the File Formats Blog.)

Here's an excerpt from the JHOVE Project Scope:

JHOVE has proven to be a successful tool for format-specific digital object identification, validation, and characterization, and has been integrated into the workflows of most major international preservation institutions and programs. Using an extensible plug-in architecture, JHOVE provides support for a variety of digital formats commonly used to represent audio, image, and textual content.

David Lowe and Michael J. Bennett, both of the University of Connecticut Libraries, have made "Digital Project Staff Survey of JPEG 2000 Implementation in Libraries" available in DigitalCommons@UConn.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

JPEG 2000 is the product of thorough efforts toward an open standard by experts in the imaging field. With its key components for still images published officially by the ISO/IEC by 2002, it has been solidly stable for several years now, yet its adoption has been considered tenuous enough to cause imaging software developers to question the need for continued support. Digital archiving and preservation professionals must rely on solid standards, so in the fall of 2008 we undertook a survey among implementers (and potential implementers) to capture a snapshot of JPEG 2000’s status, with an eye toward gauging its perception in our community.

The survey results reveal several key areas that JPEG 2000’s user community will need to have addressed in order to further enhance adoption of the standard, including perspectives from cultural institutions that have adopted it already, as well as insights from institutions that do not currently have it in their workflows. Current users are concerned about limited compatible software capabilities with an eye toward needed enhancements. They realize also that there is much room for improvement in the area of educating and informing the cultural heritage community about the advantages of JPEG 2000. A small set of users, in addition, alerts us to serious problems of cross-codec consistency and relate file validation issues that would likely be easily resolved given a modicum of collaborative attention toward standardization.