Name: NISO Update

Description: NISO Update

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Upload Date: 2021-06-03T00:00:00.0000000

Transcript: Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: Glad to. There I am. I just wanted to welcome everyone to this session on some of the projects that are in process, some of the important projects at NISO. And I've had the honor of being the chair of NISO for the past year. And I have to say that the most exciting part of learning what that is about was being able to attend every month the meetings of what's called the Architecture Committee that sits atop our topic committees and under that all the amazing working groups and volunteers that make up the community.
SPEAKER: And I think really focusing in on some of the examples you're about to hear about of projects and initiatives at NISO will give you a really good idea, for those of you who aren't as familiar with that aspect of the organization, how robust and important the work is. So I'd like to turn it over to Nettie who oversees that. And hopefully, that was the shortest introduction in history I've ever made.
NETTIE LAGACE: I don't know about in history, but it was short and sweet [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER: Here's Nettie. There you go. [LAUGHTER]
NETTIE LAGACE: Hi, everybody. I'm Nettie Lagace. I'm the associate executive director at NISO. And I have the greatest job where I get to work with all kinds of interesting people on all kinds of interesting projects all day long. And so this is a NISO update. But it's a selection. It's three, I think, representative projects that showcase the different audiences, the different stakeholders, the different kinds of things that we work on.
NETTIE LAGACE: And I hope you will enjoy it. We have three presentations on MECA, the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach, with speakers Tony Alves and Stephen Laverick, Content Platform Migrations with Athena Hoeppner. And then the KBART team, Robert Heaton, Noah Levin, Andree Rathemacher, and Stephanie Doellinger are here. Our format is, I think, pretty informal. If you've ever attended a NISO update at ALA or another conference, you might know how it works.
NETTIE LAGACE: We do a short presentation from each of the projects. And what we're going to do on Zoom here is when the presentations are over with, we're going to offer you breakout rooms. And I think I'll have to set those up again because we closed the Zoom. But you'll be offered a breakout room. And I can also send you to a breakout room if the interface doesn't work.
NETTIE LAGACE: And there will be discussions. The Q&A for each project will be within that project's breakout room. And you should be able to move around between the sessions, between the breakout rooms, if you wish. So with that, I think we'll get started with the presentations. So Tony and Stephen, you're on. And you should be able to share your screen.
NETTIE LAGACE:
TONY ALVES: Stephen, you're running the slides, right?
STEPHEN LAVERICK: I'm doing that, am I? Right, OK. I can do that. OK. So there we go. I think you should be able to see the screen. Tony, do you want to kick off?
TONY ALVES: Sure. So my name is Tony Alves. I am a scholarly publishing free agent. I used to be with Aries Systems for about 20 years designing online submission and peer review tracking systems. And I can be found @OccupySTM on Twitter. And Stephen, do you want to introduce yourself?
STEPHEN LAVERICK: Yeah, sure. I'm Stephen Laverick. I'm the director with Green Fifteen Publishing Consultancy. My background is very much in XML workflows, creating efficiencies with XML workflows, and, yeah, trying to help everybody along their way a little bit quicker and a little bit easier.
TONY ALVES: Great. So what is MECA? A straightforward description of the Manuscript Exchange Common Approach recommendation is that it's a documented methodology describing how to create a package of computer files and how to transfer the contents of that package in an automated, machine-readable way. The magic of MECA is that it lays out an easy to follow map to accomplish this.
TONY ALVES: The MECA specification fully describes how a software system should structure the files, assemble, and transmit them. The purpose of MECA is to establish a common, easy to implement protocol for transferring research articles from one system to another so that these different systems don't have to develop multiple pairwise solutions for each and every system they need to talk to.
TONY ALVES: So in 2017, John Sack from Highwire Press contacted Lyndon Holmes, the CEO of Aries Systems, and asked if Aries would be interested in collaborating with other submission system vendors to come up with a common methodology for transferring manuscripts between the varied systems. That project kicked off with representatives from Highwire, Aries Systems, Clarivate e-Journal Press, and the Public Library of Science who at the time were building their own submission system.
TONY ALVES: Over to you, Stephen.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: So that original team that Tony mentioned, they thrashed out their thoughts on how such an initiative would work and came up with an initial set of recommendations. But they also recognized that the use cases for an initiative of this kind around exchanging manuscripts was going to stretch quite far beyond the originally stated objectives, and as such would need input from further industry stakeholders.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: This is really where the involvement with NISO originated as a way to formalize those recommendations and extend further into the industry. It's also when I became more formally involved with the MECA recommendation as well. The expanded team included ACS, APS, Cold Spring Harbor, eLife, IEEE, Green Fifteen, JYSK, JCI, NLM, Springer Nature, and Taylor and Francis.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: And with all of those additional stakeholders coming in, essentially that really gave us the resource to be able to tackle this wider scope that had been that had been identified.
TONY ALVES: So MECA's primary objective was to alleviate author frustration. Authors are really frustrated by the redundancy of effort. They often have to repeat tasks, duplicate efforts during the manuscript submission process, especially when they're asked to resubmit a rejected paper to a different journal either with the same publisher or different publishers. And different publishers and different journals use different submission systems even within their own organization.
TONY ALVES: So it's a very frustrating and friction-filled activity. Similarly, reviewers are frustrated when they're asked to rereview papers that they've reviewed before. And it was thought that if there was a method for easily pushing reviews along with manuscripts from one journal to another on different systems, that would be really helpful.
TONY ALVES: So along with relieving author and reviewer frustration, by creating that mechanism to easily transfer manuscripts and the reviews between journals, MECA also addresses some other primary use cases. A primary use case is for new publication workflows that demand transfers to and from submission systems in preprint servers.
TONY ALVES: Another primary use case was-- because there's a growing interest in online and collaborative authoring tools, we thought that that would be another good use case, being able to transfer papers from a collaborative authoring tool onto a journal. And secondarily, we looked at the transfer of manuscripts from submission systems to other systems and services, like production vendors and repositories.
TONY ALVES: So those were the primary use cases and a secondary use case that we looked at. Looking at the principles, we reorganized ourselves around several principles. One was to let journals and authors set the rules for what is transferred. The journals and the authors decide how much information is going to be transferred.
TONY ALVES: The MECA team defined what data and files could be transferred. But only minimal data would need to be transferred to start a submission. To put it a better way, only that data required to start a submission record in another system had to be part of the MECA package. But again, it was really up to the journal and the authors to decide what was going to get transferred.
TONY ALVES: Another principle was that we really wanted to define a minimal viable product in order to get the project off the ground quickly. And we wanted to be sure that we could expand the protocol for future use cases. We wanted to design a protocol based on best practices and industry standards so that there would be low barrier to entry.
TONY ALVES: And it is useful to understand that MECA is a technical recommendation. It's not code. It's not software. It's not a database. It's not a central hub or service like [INAUDIBLE] or Orchid. It is simply a technical recommendation that describes how to package up the files, and how to send those files, and how to receive those files.
TONY ALVES:
STEPHEN LAVERICK: So we recognize that a number of different areas would need addressing in order to come up with a workable recommendation. You can see them listed there before you. The vocabulary was really all about making sure the stakeholders, who by this time were based all around the world and concerned with different segments of scholarly publishing-- basically making sure that we were all talking about the same thing.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: And essentially, this built up a glossary that now sits alongside those recommendations. The packaging really goes around how the content and the metadata would be packaged. As Tony said, the focus was very much on having low barriers to entry, having an MVP there. Ultimately, we decided that using Zip was most appropriate. Everybody's familiar with it. Everybody can use it.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: Identity-- we felt that there was a need to have a unique identifier for each of these packages, something that could be used across systems, obviously having to be portable, but wouldn't cause any conflict on either side of the transfer. We decided upon using a type 1 UUID, again something that's commonplace, very easy for users to be able to implement.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: The transmission refers to-- once you've got everything packaged up then, how does it actually get sent from system to system? Again, low barriers to entry, we decided that secure FTP was the way to go with that. And then we've actually got the metadata and the content and things like that. The article metadata, we've utilized a just compliant approach with that, an XML file which contains information about the article which is being transferred, containing things like the article title, corresponding author, all that kind of thing.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: And the transfer metadata contains information about the transfer itself-- who it's coming from, who it's going to, any instructions that might be needed to enable processing of the package once it arrives at its destination. The review metadata, we'd recommended-- well, we'd recognized the need for manuscripts to carry peer review information with them. And this was really outlining how that was going to be done.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: And then obviously, having a manifest file as well, making sure that everything that's within the package is listed so that everybody knows what's supposed to be in there, make sure nothing's missing or anything like that. So once we've worked through all of these areas, we have a set of recommendations appropriate for a common approach to the transfer of manuscripts for those use cases that Tony mentioned earlier on.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: No small feat really, considering the range of stakeholders that were involved in all of this and the various roles that they occupy in the publishing ecosystem. Something that really speaks to the collaborative approach that MECA has taken in getting everybody together, pulling everybody to in the same direction. We've previously mentioned the low barriers to entry. We felt that was really, really important here, making sure that all of the technology that we were recommending being used was and was available and is widely as possible.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: And then in June 2020, we were finally published as a NISO recommended practice.
TONY ALVES: So as Stephen mentioned, ultimately the MECA recommended practice can be seen as a successful collaboration with stakeholders from various areas of the publishing ecosystem. And it provides a framework for manuscript exchange with low barrier to entry. As with the initial recommendations, the working group recognizes that there is still work to do. And as such, many of the participants have committed to work together to evolve the recommended practice.
TONY ALVES: A NISO standing committee has been formed. And it includes the participants that you see here-- ACS, the American Diabetes Association, Apex, Aries Systems, the California Digital Library, Clarivate, Cold Spring Harbor, eLife, Green Fifteen, IEEE, NLM, Overleaf, the Public Knowledge Project, PLOS, River Valley, Scholastica, and Taylor and Francis.
TONY ALVES:
STEPHEN LAVERICK: So as previously, when we expanded the group to be able to consider additional use cases, that's exactly what we're doing again this time. Those additional use cases, Tony touched on authoring systems having been having been part of previous considerations. But we want to delve a lot deeper into that area now. The use of collaborative authoring systems online is on the rise. And we wanted to make sure that those specific requirements were being catered for, something that we probably didn't touch on that much before.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: We're going to be looking at how the content is being distributed from those platforms, whom it's been distributed to, what information is being conveyed. The publisher recommendations that we have so far all deal with the transfer of a single manuscript. The next use case that we're going to be looking at is assessing what can be done to implement the transfer of multiple manuscripts.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: One of the use cases that's brought this around was really where publishers are looking to switch between submission systems, how can they cater for that kind of mass transfer of manuscripts in a simple way that's going to be needed to do that because that's always been that always been an issue. So that's one of the additional use cases that we're going to be looking at. We're also going to be looking at expanding on the recommendations.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: When we were previously looking at the peer review area, we were aware that there were a number of other industry stakeholders who were looking closely around there, particularly [INAUDIBLE] for reuse group. Ideally, we would have liked to align our recommendations with theirs to give a bit more of a standard approach across national initiatives. But the timelines just wouldn't work for us at all.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: [INAUDIBLE] are only now looking at having their recommendations around peer review going out for public comment. So if we hung around for that, then we wouldn't have been able to publish in the timely manner that we did. But we are going to be picking up on this area again and working with [INAUDIBLE] as well as of the stakeholder groups to see how we're going to be able to develop our recommendations with those.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: Also in terms of packaging, we're going to be looking at whether JSON could be used as an alternative to XML to be able to give users the option to utilize one or the other. Alongside that, we're also going to be looking at whether API calls could be used as an alternative to the SFTP delivery method. And then something else that we're putting a lot of effort into is outreach.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: For a relatively small voluntary initiative, it's a huge challenge for us to effectively get the word out about what it is that we're doing. It's all very well, us coming up with this approach which is designed to make a problematic area more efficient. But if potential users don't know about it, then the impact is only ever going to be very limited to those who are aware.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: We already have the MECA website. The page is on the NISO site. They all have very, very good information on them. We've recently launched our Twitter account to help keep people informed. Similarly, we also have a group on LinkedIn where we're going to be posting updates and items of interest. So yeah, to wrap up, I think just to say that it would be very much appreciated if anybody would be able to help us spread the word about MECA to be able to help pass these efficiencies out amongst the ecosystem and those people who might need them.
STEPHEN LAVERICK: Thank you very much.
TONY ALVES: Thank you.
NETTIE LAGACE: Great. Thank you, Stephen and Tony. That was a great presentation. So there'll be time for your questions in the breakout room shortly. So next up, we have Athena Hoeppner who will be speaking about the content platform migrations work which is coming together right now. You're on, Athena.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Oh, thank you. And thank you for having me today. Good afternoon, or morning, or evening wherever you are in your time zone. I am going to be talking about content platform migrations. And the reason I'm the one talking about it is because I am co-chair of the Content Platform Migration working group. I'm also the co-chair of the NISO Information Policy and Analysis Topic Committee, which is the topic committee that this working group reports to.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: So there we go. I clicked twice and it didn't go. So I was worried for a moment. So the reason this came around is the usual situation for these sorts of standards, or workgroups, or any of the work that NISO does. There was a problem that needed a solution. So this is the setting that initiated the formation of this working group.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Migrations are happening very frequently. And I did an informal survey at the very beginning of the thinking about creating this, reaching out to librarians asking how often they-- well, not just librarians, reaching out on the electronic resources and libraries list asking people to report how many migrations they had experienced in the last three years. That was 2016 to 2019 at the time.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And libraries reported that there had been 30 migrations that they told us about. Content platforms said, I think it was something like 10. And publishers reported I think five. So there were a lot of migrations. And they involve a lot of inherent complexities, just for the fact that you're taking a whole bunch of content-- you have to deal with the metadata, the content itself, and move it to a new platform.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: You 'also are looking at a bunch of stakeholders involved. And sometimes, those stakeholders aren't immediately obvious. People don't think of them all right away. So the people who are migrating the content may not consider all of the significant technologies involved or the stakeholders that they should reach out to. And that leads to some failure to communicate key points or to resolve some technical issues that could be resolved with some forethought and knowledge.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: So problem-free migrations were a rarity rather than the norm. I'm not saying that all of them were awful. But they usually had some hitch. All right, so the work I did-- a workplan idea was born. At the time, Kimberly Steinel-- Steinle-- I apologize, I always get that wrong-- and I were both on the Information Policy and Analysis topic committee.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And we thought this would be a good idea. So we discussed it. And these were a couple of quotes from the time. I'm not going to read them out. But we both felt like this would be a good direction. So we submitted a work proposal. And these are the phases of a work proposal in general. And we had phase 1, the idea. We proposed to work item.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: We submitted it to the topic committee. And the topic committee did agree to it. They said, that's a good idea. So we moved forward to create the work item and to get a roster. And I was really-- oh no, of course the dog's going to bark right now. I was really heartened by the response. We put out a call for people to maybe be part of the working group.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And we had so many responses from all across the stakeholders. There were statistics providers, platform providers, publishers, of course librarians. And it was really a nice, large group. It was so many that we couldn't accept everyone. So we ended up with a nice selection representing a lot of stakeholders, very knowledgeable people.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And we got busy creating our work plan. And then draft 4 is where we've been for the last year and more, drafting the actual recommended practice. And then we'll move on to those next steps later. So getting to work-- this is what we set out to do. The goal of the work plan, or the work item, is to develop a recommended practice that will help normalize content platform migrations.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And it really focuses a lot on communication. And it's a recommended practice. It's not a standard. So we're not telling people-- we're not really nearly as detailed as a standard would be. There's no infrastructure behind it or anything. This is considered opinions and expertise from people put together in a way that we think will help people do a better job of handling migrations, is what it comes down to.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: To get to this, to achieve this goal, we reviewed a whole bunch of the previous migrations-- the communications about them, the plans, the timelines-- both from emails that we had seen, but also from a lot of the publishers and content providers that were on the work group. Then we identified the stakeholders. We reached out to people, did interviews and so forth, surveys.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And we identified and reviewed a lot of relevant standards that seemed like they were good ones for us to model or going to be relevant to the work involved of a migration. And then of course, the drafting process-- that took a lot of back and forth. And we had a very active group. We split the work up. And a lot of people would say, my expertise leans more towards metadata.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: I'll write sections on that. My expertise is more about linking technologies. I'll write about that. So we divvied up the work. And at long last, you're getting a sneak peek of the recommended practice. Here's the table of contents. And you can see, of course, it has an introduction. And then the main sections deal with linking the actual content migration, dealing with accounts, how to consider usage statistics and migrate those, and then a whole section just on communication.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And then we have several appendices that give additional details, dig in a little bit more than the sections above. And then finally, that checklist, which I think is a highlight of this outcome that we've got. So let's take a look here in a little bit more detail about the contents of our recommended practice. And this is a draft still. So don't think this is exactly what it's going to look like.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: But in each of these subsections, there's a summary and then a discussion of the relevant topics. Some of them need more discussion than others. And then they each conclude with recommendations and responsibilities that identify who is the owner of those responsibilities. And then we took those recommendations and we turned them into a checklist.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And you may think of a checklist as, OK, I've got a PDF and I put a checkmark. It's a list of items. This is actually a spreadsheet. So it's got column headers for phase, activity type, primary stakeholder, auxiliary stakeholder, and then the actual recommended task or thing to accomplish. You probably can't see it too well, but there's a little filter option.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: So you'll be able to filter these to say, this is what I want to focus on. I just need to see the pre-migration stuff. Or for instance, I could say, this is the immediate post-launch, things dealing with access that librians [INAUDIBLE] do. So it's three items that I need to say, OK, someone needs to go and verify that our authentication still works.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Someone needs to make sure that we still have access to the entitlements that we thought we should have access to. And here is an example for publishers. That's pre-migration dealing with metadata. So these are some recommended things that a publisher might think about. And of course, then you could filter for the different stakeholders or phases and so forth.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: You can then transfer this into any format that you want. So I think that that checklist is going to be very valuable for people planning and customizing this recommended practice for their situation and their workers. That's what we hope. So the next phase is we're going to-- we have the draft almost done. But it needs to be finalized and put into a format that can be then approved to go out for public comment.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And I hope that that public comment period will catch your all's attention and that you'll take a look because there's certainly things that could be improved. I am confident there's stuff that we've worded in a confusing way, maybe things that we forgot. And we want to know about those so that we can make this the best tool possible for people. 'Once the public comment period is done, hopefully we can get an approval.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: And then there may be some ongoing maintenance. And I think Nettie could give you all the details of what all of these things involve. So I'm not even going to try and dig in anymore. But I do want to point out this has been going on for a while. We've done a few presentations. I've linked down to the Content Platform Migration working group page as it exists right now, and then also one of our earlier presentations about this I believe that you would be able to go and watch it.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: There's been several. You've maybe even seen one of our presentations at one of the other events. But we've tried to reach out and get the word out so that people will be interested, and give us feedback, and use this tool once it's available. And that's it from me.
NETTIE LAGACE: Awesome, Athena. Thank you so much. That was a whirlwind tour. And there was questions about when is it out, when is it coming out. And I'll be honest, it's in my lap right now. Athena and her co-chair, Kim, finished their last checklist of stuff on Monday, I think.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: We dropped it in your lap right before the conference.
NETTIE LAGACE: Sunday. Sunday night, I got it in my email. So it's in my inbox. And I said, I'm not sure how much time this week. But we do have breaks coming up this afternoon. So maybe I'll be motivated to move it along a little bit. So it should be out for public comment very soon. All right, so next up, we have KBART. And Noah Levin is going to be speaking about that. Noah, where are you?
NETTIE LAGACE: I don't see you in my Zoom screen. But I've got seven screens.
NOAH LEVIN: I'm certainly here. Hello.
NETTIE LAGACE: Oh, there you are. OK, good. So the floor is yours to share and speak.
NOAH LEVIN: Perfect. So I'm going to share my screen. So give me a second while I coordinate that. All right, so hopefully you can see my screen and no longer see just my face smiling at you all. So my name is Noah Levin. So I am the KBART standing committee co-chair.
NOAH LEVIN: I'm presenting today along with my other colleagues-- Andree, Stephanie, and Robert. And this is called "KBART Unresolved Questions." So today, I'm actually just doing a little bit of an introduction where I'm going to give a quick introduction to KBART and what we're doing with our current plans. And really, the main goal of today is we want to do a discussion with you all and get your thoughts, with your usage of KBART, what you're looking for out of it, and also with certain things that we're looking to implement with phase 3 and perhaps your thoughts on that as well.
NOAH LEVIN: So that's going to really come out in the breakout session. So as such, I'm going to talk very quickly. So as I just said, this is what we're discussing today. Here is the-- so right now, I'm just doing this introduction. I'm going to break into groups. You'll see down here the questions we're going to be asking you. So I'll come back to this in a little bit. And we'll be looking to come to you for this.
NOAH LEVIN: And then we'll discuss that in the breakout room, what you come up with. So what is KBART? KBART started off as a UKSG and NISO working group. And then as of 2014, that's very specifically NISO. Some of these slides incidentally I have here just for your reference. I'm going to go a little quickly through some of these. So this is your friendly neighborhood KBART standing committee.
NOAH LEVIN: It's a cross-industry group, as you can see, coming everywhere from publishing, to content providers, discovery services, libraries, institutions, and so on. KBART itself is-- the idea with that is to create files from the content provider that shows the sellable packages. That is then loaded onto the link resolver sites, your knowledge base.
NOAH LEVIN: So the idea is that your institution will have purchased content from, say, a publisher, journals, or books, and so on. And you want to be able to see, in your discovery service, what it is you purchased so that you can link to it. So KBART is just this lists of files that show what these sellable packages that are then pushed over to the knowledge base that you can go in and then select it. And then that then feeds up to the discovery layer and allows you to search that.
NOAH LEVIN: This is just a sample of what it looks like. It's actually text-based, tab delimited text-based, which is also to allow it to be readable. Automation itself was introduced in 2019. So that basically just automates that process. But one of the key differences-- so you go into the publisher site. It's like, OK, I want all my holdings sent automatically [INAUDIBLE] But what's different is instead of these sellable package lists-- instead, it's institution-specific data on the title and journal level that is sent over to the knowledge base.
NOAH LEVIN: So it's very institution-specific. Within KBART itself-- so we put out phase 1 back in 2011. And that was very much for journals. Phase 2 came out, I believe, in 2014. And that was looking at also monographs, open access, and consortia. And now, we're currently working on phase 3. And also, although it's not on here, KBART automation, the guidelines for that came out in 2019.
NOAH LEVIN: So right now, we're currently working on phase 3. Phase 3 itself-- here, you'll see our working plan. The main thing to note is right now we are in stage 5. What that means is we've broken into our individual groups, while we're still working as a standing committee, and are looking at implementing the different parts of the proposal. We started doing that in March 2020. So we planned that perfectly to timing it at the start of the pandemic.
NOAH LEVIN: As such, I've stopped listing timelines since those timelines were created before the apocalypse hit the world. So what are our work items? Now, I'm going to hit a few of these and I'm going to hit some of these a little quickly. But the main part is we're looking at the recommendations and trying to clarify those.
NOAH LEVIN: We felt there were certain parts that folks were sometimes a little-- maybe the guidance could be a little bit better. We're also looking at how to deal with things like withdrawn titles, no longer available titles, titles with grandfathered access, gap coverage. And so we're looking at creating better examples for all of that. We also want to streamline our endorsement process, perhaps creating a multi-tiered system.
NOAH LEVIN: So that way, say for example [? etitle ?] history is a little difficult, that won't stop you from being able to still get endorsed, and at the same time rewarding people whose files are so beautiful it would make you cry. We're also looking at-- and this is key to one of the things we're talking about today is additional content types. So we want to look at, in phase 3, things like audio, video, images, data sets, manuscripts.
NOAH LEVIN: And so we want to know, also especially from you, how can we best put this in KBART. What type of multimedia are we perhaps not thinking of that should be in there? So that's something we'll be talking about today. We're also looking at how to handle global content, especially with representation of authors and titles in multiple languages and translations, also having a file guide as well.
NOAH LEVIN: So that way, publishers have-- sometimes, they're selling a ton of content. How do you navigate that? What is perhaps offered in the past that's not? So just having a file guide to help folks. A new license agreement-- also looking at new format options. So that's things for the future, is new format options and article chapter level data.
NOAH LEVIN: We want to create a roadmap for that, perhaps allowing JSON or XML files. And that would be in addition to current KBART practices and also article chapter level data, really to allow more granular information. So that's stuff we're looking at in the future. And a lot of that also comes out of KBART automation because it's gotten to that institutional holdings level. And then also our mission statement, which we want to incorporate things from KBART automation.
NOAH LEVIN: And also, KBART itself was just so widely adopted that people are using it for more things than its original scope 10 years ago. So we want to really show that. So I'm going to hand over. So what we're going to be doing-- in our breakout chat, we're going to have an interactive URL. My colleague, Stephanie Doellinger, is going to talk about this a little bit more than me.
NOAH LEVIN: And we're going to ask these questions-- how you're using KBART, what is not possible that you would like, and also with the additional content types, what do you wish was supported and how we should do that. So thank you very much. And please join us in our breakout session.
NETTIE LAGACE: OK, thank you thank you Noha. And thanks to all the presenters. So we've still got some time for some Q&A and discussion. And we thought maybe the best approach with such a large group-- it's great that so many of you showed up today. Thank you all for coming-- was that we would open up breakout rooms. So I have created breakout rooms. And you should be able to assign yourself.
NETTIE LAGACE: I'm going to open them all up. So I'm assuming you're going to see a screen with a choice. Choose the room you want. And you will be able to-- should be able to move between rooms. So I'm opening all the rooms. And I will close the meeting. Or I'll call you all back three minutes before the end, or come back to the main room any time you want to.
NETTIE LAGACE: If you don't see a screen that you can use to get into a breakout room, you can either speak up and tell me who you are and I'll move you, or put it in the chat and I can move you. Happy to help you go to the breakout room of your choice for MECA, content platform migrations, or KBART.
NETTIE LAGACE: Looks like--
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: Nettie, I still can't see how to get in, if you don't mind.
NETTIE LAGACE: Oh, no worries, Andree. Let me just find you. And of course, it doesn't give me an alphabetized list. Oh, there you are. No, it's silly, silly Zoom. All right, I'm putting you-- oops, sorry.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: [INAUDIBLE] Stephanie.
NETTIE LAGACE: OK, hang on. It keeps moving. OK, Andree. Oops, I didn't get you-- Andree is in KBART. Where's Stephanie? Yeah, I don't see the screen that you guys see. So it's hard for me to--
TONY ALVES: Nettie, I don't see a screen either, if you could put me into MECA.
NETTIE LAGACE: Sorry, who is that?
TONY ALVES: It's Tony.
NETTIE LAGACE: Oh, Tony, there you are, yes. Sorry, I've got too many little windows open here.
TONY ALVES: I think it might be the cohosts.
NETTIE LAGACE: There you are, Tony. I put someone else in KBART that I didn't mean to. It moved before I could put in--
AUDIENCE: Probably me.
NETTIE LAGACE: Sorry Ken, didn't mean to move you against your will. Anybody else want to go somewhere that they can't and I can help? I can help you. Ken for MECA. OK. Earlier, was 30 people. And now, I've got 100 people. So let me just find you, Ken.
TODD CARPENTER: OK. If you could just put it in the chat, that way we don't have lots of people saying the same-- speaking simultaneously. And we can do this.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yeah, that's how you could help, Todd, is slot people in where they want to go. Ken, I don't see you in my list. How strange is that? Let me just--
AUDIENCE: Maybe I'm in stealth mode.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yes, if I put you in KBART. Maybe that's where you are. Let's see. Yeah, there you are. So I'm going to move you, Ken, to MECA. Bye.
AUDIENCE: OK, thanks.
NETTIE LAGACE: And let's see.
TODD CARPENTER: Allister, I've got you.
ALICE MEADOWS: [INAUDIBLE] Just so you know, I'm helping out as well.
NETTIE LAGACE: OK. Paul, I'm going to put you in MECA.
ALICE MEADOWS: Amanda, you're going to migration.
NETTIE LAGACE: [INAUDIBLE] Wade's going to KBART.
ALICE MEADOWS: [INAUDIBLE] I'm moving you to [INAUDIBLE] platforms migration.
NETTIE LAGACE: And Martin is going to migration.
ALICE MEADOWS: Christina, I'm putting you in KBART.
NETTIE LAGACE: Let's see. Amanda.
TODD CARPENTER: Already done. I think that's everyone.
NETTIE LAGACE: That's everyone who's asked.
TODD CARPENTER: Everyone who's asked.
NETTIE LAGACE: OK. So folks still in the main room, you are welcome to hang out in the main room. If you would like to go somewhere, let us know. OK. Young, I'm going to send you to KBART.
TODD CARPENTER: Or if you have any questions or would like to ask all things NISO, we could do that as well, if any of you have anything you'd like to discuss, any projects that we didn't talk about.
NETTIE LAGACE: There were a lot of projects we didn't talk about.
TODD CARPENTER: There are definitely projects we didn't talk about.
ALICE MEADOWS: [INAUDIBLE] we didn't and we did, but--
TODD CARPENTER: Could we spent all of the projects we didn't talk about into 15 minutes?
NETTIE LAGACE: No, no.
ALICE MEADOWS: We could speed-talk.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah, I think it would take 15 minutes just to think of them all and say their names.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yep.
ALICE MEADOWS: I feel like that could be-- you remember those game show things where they would have-- I don't know if you have them over here. But in the UK, we had one where there was a conveyor belt with lots of different objects. And you had to remember as many objects. And you won everything that you remembered. We could have a game like that for standards. All the standards roll past. And then you have to name as many as you can.
ALICE MEADOWS: I don't know what you win.
TODD CARPENTER: So friends of mine-- I used to-- when I lived in Washington, I had friends, a group of friends who worked for the State Department. And every once in a while, they'd start up with one of these games which would be-- you'd have a group of people, say 10 people. And then you'd go around. And everyone would have to say the name of an African or Asian country.
TODD CARPENTER: And if you couldn't think of one or you said one that was already said, you were out, which made for really interesting-- you get down to a point where I just can't think of any more. And there are 40 of them. Most of the world isn't that-- most of Americans unfortunately aren't that good at geography.
TODD CARPENTER: But the folks in the State Department are really good at that sort of thing. I think that I would hate to play that game with, say, the folks who work on this 3166.
NETTIE LAGACE: Or like a National Geographic agency, yeah.
TODD CARPENTER: [INAUDIBLE].
NETTIE LAGACE: Yeah, looks like-- I'm a cohost. Breakout rooms are a little confounding. I don't see a way for me to go to any breakout room. Why is that?
TODD CARPENTER: I can send.
ALICE MEADOWS: I think you can go to--
NETTIE LAGACE: I don't necessarily want to go. I just wish I could be a little bit more self-directed, that's all.
ALICE MEADOWS: Nettie, I think if you hover over the title of the one, you get a little notice says Join over on the right. And I think that's how you join.
NETTIE LAGACE: Oh, yes. OK. Now, I see. Yep, thank you.
ALICE MEADOWS: This was one of my learning experiences yesterday when I thought I knew what I was doing with breakout rooms.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yeah, I guess there's a lot of options in Zoom. And I guess it's an interface quandary.
ALICE MEADOWS: Well, it also depends on how you set the breakout rooms up. Each setup works slightly differently, as far as I can tell. So you think you've [INAUDIBLE] one way, and then [INAUDIBLE] a different way and expect it to behave the same. And it doesn't. But most people are successfully in breakout rooms.
ALICE MEADOWS: That's good.
NETTIE LAGACE: It looks like people are doing OK. There's no been no calls for help.
AUDIENCE: Where I am, I can see that there's still eight people who haven't been assigned to breakout rooms. But a good portion of that are NISO people, I think.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yeah.
TODD CARPENTER: And I'm just saying-- I'm going to take this into Slack. But we'll have to edit this 10 minutes out of the recording.
NETTIE LAGACE: Jason has sounded confident that that all is very easy to do. I might go into one of the meeting rooms. If I don't come out, can someone please close the breakout rooms at three minutes to and bring everyone back?
AUDIENCE: We'll have Saint Bernards all lined up a little brandy casks for exactly that reason, Nettie.
NETTIE LAGACE: OK, I'm going in and hope to see you again. Thanks for that tip, Alice. That was really helpful.
TODD CARPENTER: So Nettie, I will close the rooms at 2:05.
NETTIE LAGACE: Three minutes. yeah, that's fine, so just enough time for people to come back and share anything. And then if KBART's still talking., I said I'd keep the main room open for them.
TODD CARPENTER: Oh, we can keep the KBART open, yeah.
NETTIE LAGACE: No, I don't think we can keep just one breakout room.
TODD CARPENTER: We can close all the rooms. But if KBART folks want to keep talking, they can.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yep. OK, I'll see you.
TODD CARPENTER: Have fun.
NETTIE LAGACE: OK, it's 2:55. So I'm going to send a message that the breakout rooms will be closing in a minute. I think that's what they're set to.
TODD CARPENTER: Do you want me to close them?
NETTIE LAGACE: No, I can do that. I can do that now that I'm back.
TODD CARPENTER: All right, great.
NETTIE LAGACE: So stick around.
TODD CARPENTER: I'm not going anywhere. I just don't have to do that.
NETTIE LAGACE: OK, good.
NETTIE LAGACE: People can choose to start coming back.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: We've all been recalled.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yes. I hope that was enough time for discussions.
AUDIENCE: Not really.
NETTIE LAGACE: Oh.
AUDIENCE: A good starting point to discuss further. And I don't know where, but yes, thank you. At 9-7 seconds, everyone will be whisked back. Looks like KBART is still rolling. Oh, all right. So everybody, thank you all. That was-- we've got three minutes.
AUDIENCE: So are there things that you would like to say in general to the whole group? Or do you need more time to discuss? I'm happy to keep the room open for anyone who wants to keep talking to-- any observations, questions, NISO projects, anything you want to share either in chat or in speaking?
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Well, I can share that whenever you talk about content platform migrations, people have all of the horror stories and problems. So it's always a validation that it's a needed recommended practice.
NETTIE LAGACE: Well I guess we'll have a key performance indicator in a couple of years if there's fewer complaints about the process after the recommended practice is published.
AUDIENCE: And also, it's a means of saying, but hey, we did our job. We followed that checklist. I can't help that it didn't work.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Oh no, that means we need to revise it.
SPEAKER: Well, we did come up with a few follow-up practices.
NETTIE LAGACE: Oh, good, good. I think there's also a Discourse thread on this. So further discussions can go into Discourse. And I will be putting up the slides in Slack-- not in Slack, in Sched. So you'll have all those to refer to. And I think that's it. So thank you all for joining us today. This was really exciting and all great presentations.
NETTIE LAGACE: And looking forward to continuing the conversation for the next few days here at NISO Plus. Thanks, everybody.
SPEAKER: Thank you all.
TODD CARPENTER: Before we draw this session to a close, I want to tell people that if you want regular updates to all of these projects, you can subscribe to NISO Information Organized, which is our monthly newsletter. And hat tip to Jill for all of her work in that regard.
NETTIE LAGACE: I'm putting the link to the little form for that in the chat. It's a Bit.ly link, bit.ly.subscribe.niso. And you can sign up for the kinds of things you wish.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for that, Nettie. I was working on digging it out. You got to it first.
TODD CARPENTER: Excellent.
NETTIE LAGACE: Handy little form. And how long the materials available in Sched? I think as long as Sched is up. And I don't think we have plans to take Sched down.
TODD CARPENTER: No, we won't be taking it down. And I have used Sched for a number of years. And if you log into Sched, you can see previous events that you have attended.
AUDIENCE: Which actually brings me to the question, is it possible for us who didn't go to last year's conference to see last year's content?
TODD CARPENTER: Most of the content wasn't recorded.
ALICE MEADOWS: You can look at the slides though, if that's helpful, on our feature repository, where we provided the slides. They're all freely available there. I know it's not quite the same thing.
AUDIENCE: OK. Slides is better than nothing. Thank you.
NETTIE LAGACE: Yeah, this virtual conference has a lot of advantages for some mechanical things, too.
TODD CARPENTER: Yes. I think there were some recordings of some things. And those are also in feature, I believe.
ALICE MEADOWS: I think there were a couple actually on the video repository, Todd. And they are freely available. So it was just the keynotes and maybe one or two of the sessions.
TODD CARPENTER: All right. Well, thank you, everyone. We have a break. We will be reconvening at

6: 30 PM for a social hour.
NETTIE LAGACE: Eastern time.
TODD CARPENTER: Sorry, that's 6:30 Eastern time. That's GMT 11:30 as a standard reference point. We have art and conversations. It'll be a fantastic use of Gather.town. If you need, there is a link on how to get there. And then we have another block of sessions this evening for our friends in APAC, just continuing the amazing content with a two-block session this evening.
TODD CARPENTER: So with that, thank you all for participating so far in NISO Plus. This has exceeded all of our expectations. And I hope the rest of the conferences is a success for you all. [MUSIC PLAYING]
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: We'll give everybody just another second here to jump over. I know Nettie had to move some people. And then we'll get started.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: And I've put a link to EasyRetro, kind of like a [INAUDIBLE] board in the chat. So we're going to be asking you to interact with that. So you should just be able to click right on that board in the chat and get into it. And Stephanie will talk more once we get started.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: We have Noah now. Noah, did a lot of people make it over when you came over? I can't hear you, Noah.
ROBERT HEATON: You're muted, Noah.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: You're muted, Noah. We can't hear you.
NOAH LEVIN: I was talking with my mute on, sorry. There was about 27 people when I just checked, in here with us, 29 now. There's still a number of people with Nettie. But that was two minutes ago or so.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: OK, let me go ahead and--
ROBERT HEATON: They're still working.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: I'm just going to get started for the sake of time. So I'm Stephanie Deollinger. I am helping Andree and Noah with this part of the process, with gathering information for the next steps for the KBART phase 3. And so today, what we're looking for is we put together four questions that we're looking for feedback on. And as Andree mentioned, she has shared a link in the Comment section.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: If you can open that up-- if you're unable to open it, if you want to draw up comments into the chat, we can try to drop them into the board for you live if you're unable to open the EasyRetro interactive site. But the idea is that we have four questions, which is-- how are you using KBART today? And how would you like to use KBART that's not possible today?
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: What additional content types do you wish KBART supported? And what additional fields would best support new types of content? And we're looking for feedback from users of KBART to help us deliver, for phase 3, what is coming next. And so we're going to take about the next five minutes for you to draw upon thoughts on this. If you want to put one item per comment box, if you have a couple of different things, please open a separate comment box for each thing.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: And then you can add comments to all four topics and multiple comments to each topic. Just please put one item per box. And then we'll hand it over to Andree and Robert here in just a few minutes, after everybody's had time to put up their thoughts.
AUDIENCE: Stephanie, could you repost the link?
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: Yeah, I can do that.
ROBERT HEATON: One thing that I'd suggest as we brainstorm here-- there's always the question of, are we going to have too many suggestions or not enough? But just from all your perspectives, I'd encourage you to think of maybe the product lifecycle, whether you're creating a product or subscribing to one, that kind of thing. Are you currently using KBART early in the process when you're considering making a purchase or selling something?
ROBERT HEATON: What about when you're doing a cancellation of a package? Are you thinking about which titles are perpetual access? And is KBART doing that? Or do you wish you could do part of that? That kind of thing. Maybe the more ongoing review of gathering usage data and checking accessibility and those other things that go on in the middle stages. Are there things that you look to KBART for or wish that you could?
ROBERT HEATON: And then certainly, those last two questions relate that to what is the type of content that you're most focused on right now. Is there one that's giving you trouble? Is there one that's different? Is there something that you wish you had more metadata to manage?
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: Is there anyone you didn't get the link OK at this point? OK, good.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: And also know you can go ahead, if you have something, and put it into the chat, too. I just dropped some-- I just dropped feedback into the board. We can do that if it's easier.
AUDIENCE: While everybody is typing, maybe I can just add a thought here because obviously KBART is very related to what the role of a knowledge base is. And maybe that's also something to think about here. Not just what is the KBART file doing, but what it's actually used for and what is the role of the knowledge base today, and what might it be in future. Just adding a note here.
AUDIENCE:
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: And also, we'll be past time. There's another KBART presentation on Thursday. And we're talking about a KBART validator, which is the initial efforts on behalf of some of the members of our standing committee to create a program that automatically checks KBART files for compliance with the recommended practice. So I put the link to that program in the chat.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: We're coming up on our five minute mark now. Continue to go ahead-- if you have other things, you can put them on the board. But we would like to start our discussion now.
ROBERT HEATON: Sure. I'll jump in with some of the high level thinking here. Thanks so much for the great suggestions and keep them coming. It's really a balance, as we look forward to the-- we look back to the value of the simplicity of these fixed fields. You just fill in the blanks, and it's done, to that possibility in the future of such an expanded role of article-level metadata and individual institutional holdings and these more customized things that provide more value.
ROBERT HEATON: But there's a greater barrier to entry for content providers to make use of that. So we really need to understand what you're doing, what you want to do. So I think what Andree and I are hoping to do is just kind of look at some of these and see if there's interesting ones that we can tease out a little bit. Anything that you're seeing, Andree?
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: I'm still scanning. I mean, one of the things that we talk about a lot with KBART-- and this gets confusing even for those of us who work in this area all the time-- is KBART is essentially-- I mean, as it's been so far, it indicates holdings and how to link. So it's something that populates knowledge bases where libraries go in and select what they have.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: And then that goes into, say, a discovery system that we have this journal from this year to this year, or we have this e-book. What KBART doesn't really do is provide metadata for discovery. So it doesn't have what librarians would put, say, in a mark record. And it doesn't have that kind of granular data that would come from, say, in all of the articles in a journal or the chapters in a book.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: And so I think that's what Robert was getting at, the balance between the simplicity of KBART and also what it's used for. So while we want to be able to expand KBART to make it more useful, it is still designed to be pretty lightweight in the sense that we just want to identify-- I have this journal. Not only do I have this journal, but I have it on, say, JSTOR and not on Elsevier.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: And I have exactly this volume and this volume. And so while we want to expand KBART, we don't want to get into thinking of it as a metadata discovery tool. So we're hoping that you can give us ideas about what kind of ways that you would like to go into your knowledge base if you're a librarian or to indicate what your content is, if you're a content provider that KBART can't do for you currently.
ROBERT HEATON: Yeah, I see we've got a mention of mark in what we'd like it to do. And then in the additional fields, there's a mention of RDA. And that has been discussed in the committee so far of can we generate mark records from that row of data in the KBART file. And like Andree says, there's real limitations there. And yet, maybe we could-- with understanding of those limitations, maybe there could be a tool for doing that in a systematic way with the recognition that it's not going to have separate headings and the things that you're going to want in a full blown mark record.
ROBERT HEATON:
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: One of the things that Noah mentioned that we're also wrestling with is KBART only exists at the package level. So if you're talking about a book, you're talking about the book itself. You're not talking about the chapters in the book. You just want to indicate that we have the book. And then your discovery system can-- or your indexing and abstracting or whatever you use, Google Scholar, can help you find the individual chapters.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: Same with articles in a journal-- KBART just says, look, we have these volumes and issues of a journal. But what articles are in that journal is completely beyond our scope. But this is more and more of a challenge on a number of levels. On the one hand, there is indication that there are some publishers that are now trying to sell custom packages of curated articles and book chapters around, for example, a topic.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: And KBART really would not, could not handle that well at this point. Also, open access-- it came up as one of the suggestions that Kmart does have a field that indicates whether a journal or a book is free or paid. But much of open access is that a more article-based level, especially in a hybrid open access context. And so we're really struggling with thinking about how, perhaps not in phase 3, but how KBART can work with a more granular type of content.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: So when we talk about-- and I mentioned this, if anyone was in the Media Metadata group earlier. When we're starting to think about things like journals and audio and video, what is a whole package? And what is the package? So this board is not going to go away. So even though Nettie is saying we're going to be going back in 43 seconds, please do continue to contribute to the discussion and add things to the board.
ANDREE RATHEMACHER: And sorry we didn't have a little more time for talking. But thank you.
NOAH LEVIN: I just want to say everybody's input here is really terrific. And thank you so much. I already took a couple of screenshots just because I thought-- not that I can't look it on my own. I just thought it was really cool, just great ideas here from everybody. So unfortunately, we are getting booted from the bar very shortly.
ROBERT HEATON: Thanks everyone.
NOAH LEVIN: Thanks, everybody.
STEPHANIE DOELLINGER: Thank you everybody.
AUDIENCE: Thanks. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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