National Information Standards Organization Research Articles

Fashion and Race Database

The Fashion and Race Database (FRD) is a subscription-based website focused on centering and amplifying historical and contemporary marginalized voices within the fashion industry. Created in 2017, the database is a curated collection of unique and exclusive content in various formats highlighting the underexamined innovations, challenges, and experiences of racialized groups within fashion. The website offers a modern design, intuitive facets, and newly implemented accessibility features. Though the content is not offered with posttermination access, the overall subscription cost is reasonable, and licensing is offered under the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Shared Electronic Resource Understanding (SERU) license. Given its diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice (DEISJ) focus, user-friendly interface, unique content, relatively manageable cost, and streamlined licensing, FRD is a strong candidate to enrich any library’s collection in the fashion discipline.

I Can’t Get No Satis-Searching: Reassessing Discovery Layers in Academic Libraries Journal of Web Librarianship

Much has been written about discovery layer strengths and weaknesses in academic libraries. Many academic libraries have a discovery layer, using products, such as those from OCLC, EBSCO, ExLibris, Summon, or open-source products, such as VuFind. But after over 10 years of academic libraries adopting discovery layers as part of their discovery ecosystem, it may be time to take a step back and revisit the question posed by the speakers at the American Libraries Live “Making the Discovery Decision” January 2014 online discussion, namely: What is a discovery layer and its purpose? Are discovery layers accomplishing what they purport to accomplish for the end user? Through examining three particular discovery layers—OCLC WorldCat Discovery, ExLibris Primo VE, and EBSCO EDS—in regards to their conformance to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)'s Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) “Checklist for Discovery Service Providers,” relevancy ranking algorithms, and mapping tables with facets, this article argues that the goals of discovery layers need to be reconsidered. Specifically, rather than the discovery layers’ goal to be Google-like and provide a self-sufficient user experience, discovery layers might be better promoted by libraries as a tool to be used most effectively with assistance from librarians. Discovery Layer vendors could focus their design efforts more on accurate faceted searching, citation tools, and saved search features, and less on esthetics and patron self-sufficiency.

Engaging with NISO

This paper provides an overview of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) - who it is, how it is structured, what it does, how it does it, and who it serves. It also provides information on how NISO Members and non-Members alike can participate in NISO’s many global activities - activities that fill a major role in ensuring that the information community runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Collaborative Metadata Definition using Controlled Vocabularies, and Ontologies

Collaborative Metadata Definition using Controlled Vocabularies, and Ontologies

Open-source code to convert Journal Article Tag Suite Extensible Markup Language (JATS XML) to various viewers and other XML types for scholarly journal publishing

There are many ways to use open source code to implement digital standards for scholarly journal publishing. However, providing digital services using open-source code can be a challenge, especially for small and local academic society journals. This paper provides some critical examples of using some of the many open-source code resources available to the public. Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been established as an essential tool, and is now used by most journals for digital publication. JATS XML can be converted to other viewer formats, including Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, PubReader, and EPUB 3.0. It can also be used to create dynamic interactive PDFs. It can be converted to other XMLs, incluing Crossref XML, PubMed XML, and DOAJ XML. Open-source code published on GitHub, National Information Standards Organization, and the US National Library of Medicine can be used for Crossref XML deposition for digital object identifier and Crossmark stamp registration. These examples of open-source code need to be implemented on journal websites to provide local academic journal publishers with various critical functions. This paper provides instructions on the best ways to realize these digital standards so that journal content can be provided to readers in a more friendly and effective way.

Improving Journal Article Tag Suite for multilingual articles

The scenarios for journal articles that contain more than one language are no longer (and never really were) limited to having an article’s title, abstract, and keywords translated to additional languages. Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) currently has a variety of structures for tagging articles that are in multiple languages or have substantial amounts of content in more than one language. However, these structures are not all coherent and are not up to the tasks of handling some common use cases. A subcommittee of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) JATS Standing Committee (with participation from members of the Standards Tag Suite (STS) and Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS) committees and some other invited experts) was formed, in 2021, with the goal of recommending changes to JATS to enable it to usefully encode multilingual articles. The subcommittee has recommended a set of changes that introduce new structures that can be available to JATS users who need them while minimizing the burden JATS users who rarely deal with multilingual content. Most of these changes are backward compatible with earlier versions of JATS. These changes are currently a work in progress and may become available in a future version of JATS. This paper presents a proposal for improving JATS to better support tagging multilingual articles with the hope of garnering feedback and suggestions from the JATS community.

Cascading Workflows and Preprints

SPEAKERS: Tony Alves Senior Vice President of Product Management HighWire Press Hopedale, Massachusetts Allison Leung Manager, Product Development American Chemical Society Washington, DC Sven Molter Senior Product Manager Public Library of Science Charlottesville, Virginia REPORTER: Natalie Ngo Managing Editor, CJASN American Society of Nephrology Washington, DC https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3908-7353 The world of preprints and preprint servers is continuously evolving to meet the needs of researchers, offering new services and pathways tied to traditional journal publishing. Some preprint servers are now utilizing artificial intelligence tools that provide language editing, image manipulation checks, and reference formatting for added quality assurance. With these integrations and the ease of online discovery, preprints are a viable source of new scholarship. Many journals have adopted formalized pathways for authors to transfer their work from a preprint server to a journal submission site. However, it is becoming increasingly common for journals to allow authors to transfer their submitted manuscripts to a preprint server. In this session, three industry professionals discuss models and workflows for preprint transfers. Tony Alves, Senior Vice President of Product Management at HighWire Press, began by providing an overview of the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA)1 and its role in facilitating transfers. MECA, a National Information Standards Organization (NISO)-recommended practice, is a documented methodology describing how a software system should structure, assemble, and transmit files in a package “for transferring research articles from one system to another, so that the different systems don’t have to develop multiple pairwise solutions each and every time a system […]

Architektura kolekcji Polskiej Cyfrowej Biblioteki Jeździeckiej na temat stadniny koni w Janowie Podlaskim

The article deals with the topic of the architecture of digital collections presented in the Polish Digital Equestrian Library (Polska Cyfrowa Biblioteka Jeździecka), which is an example of an innovative library-thematic portal. The analysis was based on the nine principles of a good digital collection according to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Moreover, the case of the horse stud in Janów Podlaski, as an exemplary search term in the PCBJ catalogue, was presented. The results of the search about the horses’ stud in Janów Podlaski constitute a smaller percentage of the entire collection, but their value is because these materials are unique and can deepen the knowledge about the most famous Polish cultural heritage in the world.

Modern US standards for indexes of documents

Pilar Wyman and Judi Gibbs, members of the US National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Criteria for Indexes Working Group, report on the recent update of the ANSI/NISO Z39.4-2021 Criteria for Indexes. These standards provide guidelines for the content, organization and presentation of indexes used for the retrieval of documents and parts of documents. They had not been revised since 1984 and now include modern indexing techniques.

Knowledge Bases: The Heart of Resource Management

ABSTRACT This session discussed the knowledge base metadata lifecycle, current and upcoming metadata standards, and the role that knowledge bases play in e-resource management. The session provided different perspectives on knowledge bases, including from librarians, one of whom is a former knowledge base e-content analyst, and product managers, as well as a discussion of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) Automation: Automated Retrieval of Customer Electronic Holdings recommended practice and what this could mean for knowledge bases in the future. The session included a conversation regarding how leveraging knowledge bases can aid librarians in improving resource discovery within their own libraries and ultimately decrease the amount of time spent on metadata workflows.

Bringing US index standards into the modern age

Pilar Wyman reports on the work of the US National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Criteria for Indexes project, which aims to revise and extend the NISO TR02-1997 Guidelines for indexes and related information retrieval devices. The guidelines have not been reviewed since 1984 and will thus be updated to address modern indexing techniques.

Manuscript Exchange Common Approach and Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) compatibility: a case study utilizing the JATS Compatibility Meta Model

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) project is a cross-organization industry initiative to develop a common approach to manuscript transfer that can be adopted across the scholarly publishing industry. MECA establishes a vocabulary set that includes transfer, review, and manifest models. These models are designed to work with different article XML schemas, including the latest NISO Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) standard (v1.2). In order to avoid conflicts between these project vocabularies and the JATS, we reviewed the MECA vocabularies against the NISO JATS Compatibility Meta Model (v0.7). This paper describes the review and analysis of the MECA schemas against the JATS Meta Model, how we documented the analysis, and the recommendations we made to resolve issues revealed by the analysis. It includes the documentation we produced to communicate the results of the analysis and what actions we took to move forward with the project, including both changes to the schemas and requests for changes in the JATS. We hope sharing our experiences with this process will help others who are trying to do the same.

Walk This Way: Online Content Platform Migration Experiences and Collaboration

ABSTRACT Online content hosted on web-based platforms has many benefits for libraries and their patrons. Vendors will often migrate to newer platforms as new developments and products emerge. Although migrations are meant to improve services, content platform migrations are complex, resulting in problems regardless of careful preparation. In this presentation, a publisher and an academic librarian offer their experiences and challenges with online content platform migrations. A co-chair of the National Information Standards Organization’s Content Platform Migration Working Group shares the group’s work to establish content migration best practices.

Engaging With NISO

This paper is based upon presentations given at the inaugural 2020 NISO Plus Conference that was held February 23–25, 2020 in Baltimore, MD, USA. It provides an overview of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) - who it is, how it is structured, what it does, how it does it, and who it serves. It also provides information on how NISO Members and non-Members alike can participate in NISO’s many global activities – activities that fill a major role in ensuring that the information community runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Recommended practices for supplemental data

Since various forms of supplemental data (SD) have been introduced in academic publications, it has become necessary to establish guidelines to systematically process, indicate, and distribute such data. This material aims to help the science journals establish rational SD policies and guidelines and to ensure compliance with such policies and to manage them consistently. Generally, SD can be approached in a literal way by categorizing ‘appendices’ as ‘additional or separately added complementary materials’ and ‘supplements’ as ‘materials supplemental to the research in a comprehensive sense,’ rather than by viewing SD as an independent component of an article. The recommended practices of the National Information Standards Organization of USA advise the classification of SD into either ‘integral content’ or ‘additional content’ according to the content’s functional relationship to the associated article. If a public depository is used for SD, the author can ensure the perpetuity of data accessibility by assigning a digital object identifier. Science journals should adopt appropriate SD policies and describe them in detail in the instructions for authors to ensure consistent compliance with those policies. Additionally, they should be able to inspect and maintain links, repositories, and metadata associated with the SD for specific articles on an ongoing basis.

The Authentication Landscape in 2019: One Does Not Simply Walk into Order

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, access authentication has rapidly evolved. An overview of various e-resource access management types, including Internet Protocol (IP) authentication, referring and embedded URLS, barcode patterns, and user accounts with publishers, shows that though IP authentication has dominated the authentication landscape, it creates many security problems and does not offer a pleasant user experience. The standardization of single sign-on solutions as formulated by the National Information Standards Organization’s (NISO) initiative, Resource Access for the 21st Century (RA21), and continued by the Seamless Access Coalition since June 2019, seeks to improve both the discovery experience and security protocols. Two case studies, one from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and the other from Eastern Carolina University, explore the benefits, pitfalls, and practical realities of moving from an IP authentication system, EZproxy, to a single sign-on system, OpenAthens.

Publisher Platforms and NISO’s PIE-J

ABSTRACT Certain platform designs can inadvertently affect the quality of access to e-journals adversely. Sally Glaser, Chair of the Standing Committee on Presentation and Identification of E-Journals (PIE-J) for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), presented how the NISO recommended practice provides guidelines on how best to avoid problems. Julie Zhu shared how Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has been striving to incorporate the PIE-J recommendations and some of the successes or hindrances they have encountered. Heather Otrando of Cambridge University Press described how upgrades to the Cambridge Core platform created an opportunity to more fully align their presentation of e-journal content with PIE-J recommendations.

Adoption of NISO’s Shared Electronic Resource Understanding (SERU) at US Academic Libraries

Following the emergence of electronic resources (e-resources), librarians developed licensing guidelines, standards, models, and understandings to educate, increase efficiencies, and retain rights afforded by copyright law. To reduce licensing burdens, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) released the Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) in 2008, a set of “understandings” created and agreed upon by libraries and vendors. The author conducted a survey in 2017 of licensing practices and SERU use at libraries. The survey analyzed 108 responses from US academic libraries signing at least one license in the twelve months preceding the survey.

Moving to a World of More Seamless Single Sign-on Access: NISO’s RA21 Recommended Practice

In this Standards Update column, Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), provides a preview of NISO’s upcoming RA21 Recommended Practice for single sign-on systems. Carpenter describes previous attempts at single sign-on standards, the essential difficulties in authenticating users, and how RA21 will address these issues while ensuring the privacy of user data.

Manuscript Exchange Common Approach: Supporting Better Publication Flows

The Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) project is new to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), creating a recommended practice to support the transfer of scholarly manuscripts and associated materials between publishers and manuscript submission systems. This column describes the project and maps out its plan of work for 2019.