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An introduction to NISO
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An introduction to NISO
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
TODD CARPENTER: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Todd Carpenter. I'm the executive director of NISO and we're going to be going through the session, Engaging with NISO, How and Why. Joining me today is Nettie Lagace.
NETTIE LAGACE: Hi, everybody. I'm Nettie. I'm the associate executive director at NISO, and very happy to be here at NISO Plus.
TODD CARPENTER: Fantastic. Thank you all for joining us at NISO Plus. I hope you're enjoying the conference. We're going to go through a brief outline of what we're going to be talking about today. An introduction to standards, standards distribution, and standards and information exchange. We'll take you a little bit through the process-- so, I have an idea.
TODD CARPENTER: How does it become a standard? And then we'll tell you about all things NISO. How we get things done, how we engage internationally, the important role that maintenance plays in our work, who does things at NISO, and also, we'll end with how to keep in touch. So if at any time you have any questions about what we're talking about, if you have any questions about NISO generally, you can use the Q&A feature and the Zoom interface if you're watching this live.
TODD CARPENTER: Or you can type in questions into the NISO Discourse, where I'm sure there will be a thread for conversations about all things NISO. So if you look around probably any room that you're in, you will see lots and lots of standards. If you look at the electrical plugs, those are standardized. If you're in a traditional office building-- which many of us might not be right now-- you might see an Exit sign, fire protection methods, all of these things are standardized.
TODD CARPENTER: Standards pervade our lives. And there are essentially two ways to discuss information standards. We could talk in angle brackets and code, metadata fields and XML. There might be a few of you who enjoy talking in angle brackets, but I'm going to trust that many of you watching this presentation don't. The second way that we could talk about standards is kind of along these lines.
TODD CARPENTER: This is a great book by Randall Munroe. He's the cartoonist who does at the xkcd cartoon series. He came out with a book last year called The Thing Explainer, which uses very simple words to describe very complicated things. I like to think that we won't talk down to you like that. We're going to kind of take a third path, which is somewhere in between angle brackets and single-syllable words to describe the process of standards, how standards exist, and what NISO does and our role in that process.
TODD CARPENTER: So content distribution was actually one of the first industrial processes, back 500, 600 years ago, as we started to move away from handwritten texts to laying out texts in manufacturing facilities or print shots. The people who are producing those texts started to create processes and build standards around those processes.
TODD CARPENTER: We didn't think of them as standards. There wasn't Z39 committees to produce those standards. But they certainly were standards. And we applied those in different ways. This is a photo of-- from the Gutenberg Museum for the history of publishing in Mainz, Germany. And it shows the ways in which you can bind together signatures.
TODD CARPENTER: Actually, I was there prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair a number of years ago, and I saw this amazing example of a bound book that had nothing but pages of three, four, like column after column after column of single numbers. You could imagine it was sort of the printing master getting frustrated with his apprentice one day after he miscut the pages are misbound the book in some way.
TODD CARPENTER: Like, I'm going to teach you how to do this, and you're going to do it. It was hundreds of pages of nothing but numbers bound together so that you can figure out how to number the signatures. Page numbering actually solved a production problem. Prior to the implementation of page numbers, people used to write notes on the edges of pages. Usually, it was the word from the previous page so that when the book was bound, people who were doing that binding could identify, this is the last page in that signature, and this is the next page in the next, because most of the people doing the book production at the time didn't know how to read.
TODD CARPENTER: So how do you ensure that the book is numbered correctly? Well, you put numbers in them. Most people recognize numbers, most people recognize the order of those numbers. You didn't have to read the text to tell that the book was bound. We, today, hundreds of years later, find page numbers an extremely efficient way of getting to a page.
TODD CARPENTER: But it really was a production problem that was solved by a standard. Standards in publishing, standards in content creation, have become so ubiquitous in our environment that they've entered our common lexicon. In old print shops-- this is a photo of how type was laid out. And printers used far fewer of the upper case letters-- they used capital letters.
TODD CARPENTER: They were further away than the lower case letters, which you used more of. So it became part of the parlance that a capital letter was in the upper case because it was further away than the lowercase letters which used more of-- the lower case, which was below. As a matter of fact, our use of English language, or any other language, most of which had centuries of existence prior to being written down, the spelling of words has become standardized over time.
TODD CARPENTER: This is why even in American English, we spell color without a U, and in British or Canadian English, spell it with a U. Ben Franklin in the 18th century came up with his own scheme as model for revising spelling. It didn't go anywhere. It's an example of a standard for information distribution that got created and someone finished it, published a book about it, but it never got adopted.
TODD CARPENTER: So there's a long history of standards in our space, both in how we communicate, as well as successful things that have been implemented, like page numbers and uppercase and lowercase, and things which didn't quite get the same level of adoption. And these standards exist to this day. I often use ISBN as an example of like, what does Todd do, when I'm asked.
TODD CARPENTER: And I respond, well, you know the bar code on the back of a book? Those little numbers, ISBNs? Most people recognize that. Most people don't think about what is meant by an ISBN, how it works, how the systems are used for interchange, anything like that, but they are aware that books have barcodes on the back of them, and that barcode is known as an ISBN.
TODD CARPENTER: These standards grease the wheels of information creation, curation, dissemination, discovery, and preservation. And they're involved in every aspect of taking work created by someone from the research that they do to come up with their ideas, the writing of those words and submitting that to a publisher. The editorial process that crafts the author's work, bringing it into production, and printing or electronic distribution, out through the sales channels to libraries or bookstores, methods of access control, digital rights management discovery, and into the hands of readers.
TODD CARPENTER: So standards are critically important to this entire process of getting something out of the mind of a creative individual and getting it into the mind of a reader. So I'm going to talk next about how we create these standards. Where do these things come from? They all start with a problem. We're having a problem.
TODD CARPENTER: I'm binding papers together and I want to make sure they're in order. I'm having trouble moving a manuscript from one place to another. I'm having trouble describing the subject headings of a book or an article. That is my problem. We collectively are having that problem. How do we solve that problem?
TODD CARPENTER: How do we move it from a problem to a solution? So you might have one of those solutions. You might have that great idea. For improving metadata, you might have that great idea of the next great standard. What do you do with that? How do you get it out of your environment and into the community? I think it's really important, first of all, to think about, what are the benefits of why you might want this idea that you have, this problem that you have, why you might want it to be a community initiative, a standard.
TODD CARPENTER: That process has a lot of benefits both before or during the process of standardization of consensus development. And also after it's finished, and have I put "finished" in air quotes there-- or actually, actual quotes-- because standards really aren't finished. They evolve, and we'll talk a little bit about how they evolve later. But we'll take finished to mean we've come to consensus and we've agreed on it.
TODD CARPENTER: So in the before times, as we're developing consensus around a project, what are the benefits of the process of why you might want something to be a standard and why you might want to go through that process? The first is development support. More people looking at the project and the solution that you have will make it better. Community input, not just from the members of the working group, but the broader community who is looking at this issue and this problem.
TODD CARPENTER: There are also benefits to having a diverse community look at the problem because they might test features in a way, they might explore the product or the solution in a way that you hadn't because you have your own particular approach or problem that you're trying to solve. Another issue is the limitations of scope that can be put by an external party. You might want to not have solved that problem.
TODD CARPENTER: The community might want to solve a core problem. And having a third party say, well, this is the scope that we want to solve, alleviates some of that pressure on you. There's also issues of certification and accreditation. Like this is validated by NISO, by ISO, by ANSI. And it has a certain weight. There is also a benefit of promotion and outreach that this is becoming a bigger thing than your own project.
TODD CARPENTER: And that has a lot of value in terms of drawing attention towards it. Then there are issues about after the project has reached consensus, there are values and there's benefits to having done an a NISO standard, or an ISO standard, or an ANSI standard. The first is ongoing maintenance. As I said things, aren't ever finished. So we, NISO, are responsible for continuous maintenance of our projects.
TODD CARPENTER: We try to avoid putting things out, leaving them on the shelf and ignoring them because if people are using them, people will find problems, people will notice the changes going on in the community, and they'll demand, essentially, that things get fixed. We, NISO, provide an ongoing point of contact. Even as project management changes, as staffing changes at corporations, who might be responsible, NISO is the sort of institutional memory, if you will, of projects going forward.
TODD CARPENTER: We also provide a communication touchpoint for the community. Say if you developed your own project, people are always going to come knocking on your door to solve whatever issues exist in the standard that you've developed. There are benefits to having a third party take that off of you in that you separate the maintenance of this thing, the standard, from your own product, your own service.
TODD CARPENTER: People might get mad at the standard. They don't get mad at your company for maintaining the standard in a way that they don't like. They get mad at NISO. And we are also responsible, and we are actively pursuing promotion and outreach of the standards that we develop. Now this is not a perfect situation. There are pros and cons.
TODD CARPENTER: So some things to consider if you're bringing your project to NISO, if you want to make your standard a community project. The first is it could take longer. You can often get things done faster if you do them yourselves. Part of the consensus development process is having many eyes on things. People raise things that you might not have known are problems.
TODD CARPENTER: Solving those problems takes a little longer. The slide is wrong here-- we'll fix it. Community development might not solve your issue. It might not solve every problem that you have. Your problem might not be the priority of the group. And things that you-- it's your project, you can focus attention where you want on your issues.
TODD CARPENTER: But if it's a consensus project, your issues might not be the top of the priority list. So oftentimes, there is also with larger projects, a need to avoid those many interested parties from making the problem bigger and bigger and bigger. It's called scope creep. How do we avoid that? Because you might be trying to solve this particular problem, but the community has this big problem.
TODD CARPENTER: A community project is also no longer yours. It's not yours to control. Your voice is no longer privileged above everyone else's. It's the community's, which is good things and bad things. And if it's your thing, and you own it, and you take care of it, and you make sure everything is satisfied with it to your specification, to your particular demand, then in a community development project, you're one of a community.
TODD CARPENTER: And that's important to understand before entering this process. So next we're going to talk all about NISO. What is NISO? How does it work? How is the community developed? And for this point of the presentation, I'm going to pass it over to Nettie, and she can take it from here.
NETTIE LAGACE: All right. So my work is a lot about the day-to-day stuff that goes on at NISO, so I'll be explaining that. So we have some overarching principles, I guess you would say, that guide our work at NISO. And these are words that we developed with our board and our communities, and I think they really help to guide us in all the things we do. So overall, our vision is a world where everyone benefits from the unfettered exchange of information.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we want to make sure that information can be moved around, shared between parties. And we have a mission statement. Our mission as an organization is to build knowledge, foster discussion between parties, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we are a standards organization, and that's what we do. But in order to build those standards, of course, we need knowledge and discussion to create those. And moving down a few levels-- or a level-- we have some core values. So one of the core values-- and there are three-- one is engagement.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we enable libraries, publishers, and vendors-- these are our primary audiences. We're not limited to these stakeholders, but these are the ones that are our core stakeholders. We enable them to collaborate and solve problems of mutual interest by providing a neutral forum in which they can engage and build consensus. So we see ourselves very much as a, you could say, a Switzerland, a place where no entity is favored over another, and the playing field is level, and people can discuss together to reach the points where they agree, hopefully.
NETTIE LAGACE: Interoperability, so really, one of our core values, making sure that parties can enjoy choice and efficiency. And what we do is promote interoperability of information through standards and best practices. So wherever it's possible for products and services to interact, that's the areas where we see our sweet spot in creating tools that enable this interaction.
NETTIE LAGACE: And then, of course, education. We really need to lift all boats and make sure that everyone's in the know. So we work very hard, and a core piece of our work is to keep our community up to date by publishing news. You'll see all kinds of ways for us to get that information out there. Running educational programs, our webinars and virtual conferences are a really excellent piece of our work.
NETTIE LAGACE: And providing thought leadership periodic meetings or meetings like this one, where we engage people and bring out the discussions. So participating in NISO-- we've got, as I said a few slides ago, the core groups are libraries, publishers, and systems vendors, but it's really much broader than that. Really, I would say anyone who has an interest in the kinds of things that we're working on is welcome.
NETTIE LAGACE: If you are someone or some party that's affected by one of our standards or recommended practices, we do want you to participate. And so this is a slide which just shows the core groups, but then other standards development organizations are participating in our work, which is kind of cool. Subscription agents, content aggregators, book publishers, associations of all sorts, consultants who work with different organizations, and archives, and museums.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as I said-- as we said, neutrality is really key. And it's kind of nice to be thinking of traveling these days, and being like Switzerland, or being in Switzerland, but we do take seriously the fact that we are neutral. I really have to say I enjoy that part of my job that I'm a friend to all and I help everyone.
NETTIE LAGACE: So NISO, we hope you know that we create and maintain standards and best practices, or recommended practices, as we call them. We foster the adoption-- that's key. It doesn't really help if you create something if nobody uses it. So we want to make sure that people know about our standards and have tools to implement them where they are. And then also educate the community.
NETTIE LAGACE: So not just standards, but information and technology topics across the board. Anything that fits in, it's part of our scope. And then incubating thought leadership activities to advance the technology. So bring people together, get them talking, get ideas percolating and circulated. So we've got lots of-- this is only a subset of the publications that we have.
NETTIE LAGACE: And they are listed on our website, so if you were curious about all the things we do. I hope that at least a few things on this list are things that if you're not familiar with, you would feel affect you in your work. I have a background as a librarian, so I actually-- OpenURL was the first standard that I knew of, and it was core in my work, and it still is. KBART is a recommended practice which transfers information from knowledge bases-- publishers to knowledge bases.
NETTIE LAGACE: JATS is a core standard for publishers to make their information-- their publication information data about their articles available to a number of different tools. And we also do things like privacy policies, helping people understand policies. RA21 moved into seamless access, access control, authorization, authentication, and so on.
NETTIE LAGACE: So really a broad range, and that's also something that's a nice feature of NISO, is that it's lots of things for lots of people. But at the core of it, no matter what we are working on, we want to connect the different pieces together. So if you are one party that needs to connect to another, that is a good place for you to be here at NISO, putting things together.
NETTIE LAGACE: And moving on. So here we are at NISO Plus, and talking about what we're doing and how we're getting our work done. So getting our work done, that's my job. That's really my day to day, is moving things along. And so I'll be talking about how that's done. So-- oops-- one more-- there. So all of those projects that you saw in that list of publications were once a working group, and-- or we've got a lot of working groups underway right now that are working on all kinds of different things in all kinds of different areas.
NETTIE LAGACE: But these are sorted into three areas that we call our topic committees. We have named them similarly, but ICC is the Information Creation and Curation topic committee, and it has a portfolio of standards and recommended practices and working groups that are core to things like metadata, where information is born, where information is created, where information is first published.
NETTIE LAGACE: So metadata, publishing tools, that sort of thing. Information Discovery and Interchange is the second topic committee, or another topic committee, and it's, as its name says, is where information is connected. So discovery of information interfaces circulation, like transferring of information, those kinds of projects are part of that topic committee.
NETTIE LAGACE: Information and Policy and Analysis topic committee handles things that are policy analysis. So assessment, or licensing, or business rules, that sort of thing. Projects that are in those areas are in the portfolio of that topic committee. So these topic committees are made up of people in the industry, people-- volunteers, a lot like you, and we'll say a few words about that.
NETTIE LAGACE: And they may help-- they manage the decisions around these. They approve the projects and approve the publications on the way to being published by NISO. And then above that, we have an architecture committee which is made up of the co-chairs of each of those topic committees along with liaisons from our board of directors. And our board of directors is the-- as you can see, top of the chain, as in most organizations, where they make the overall decisions about the organization and the decisions about the projects.
NETTIE LAGACE: And the other work is done by the architecture committee and the topic committees, who also help us with strategy and decisions on what kinds of things we should be pursuing. So this is a little animation. And I-- we'll see how the animation goes in this context, but I just wanted to say a few words about how standards are created in hopefully a fun way. This is a clipart version of the standards creation process.
NETTIE LAGACE: So Todd talked about when you-- why you would want to bring an idea to NISO. And this is what happens when you do bring an idea to NISO. So someone has an idea about a problem they want to have solved. They create a digital proposal about it, really just a short proposal, two pages of what the problem is and how it might be solved through a standard.
NETTIE LAGACE: And we help with that, we have templates and tools. And they send it to NISO. It goes to one of those topic committees that you saw on the previous slide. They discuss it. They might have questions for the proposer. And hopefully, if they agree with it, they will stamp it approved. It then goes to our voting members who have a 30-day online ballot to look at it, to consider it, to maybe circulate it around their organizations, hopefully vote to approve it, and maybe also nominate people to serve on a working group.
NETTIE LAGACE: Next button. Then we create a working group. So we put out a call for participation, and try to make sure the working group is balanced among stakeholders. So all of those types of stakeholders that you saw, we want to make sure that everyone has a voice and a seat as applicable to the problem at hand. And the working group starts working and discusses the problem.
NETTIE LAGACE: They might run surveys, or do research outside of their group, or different ways of putting together a solution to the problem. And then they create a draft, which we circulate for public comment. That's a core piece of our process, is making sure that people outside the working group have access to something before it's published so that they can react to it, maybe put it into a test mode to see how it might work in their own situation, and then send comments back to the working group who has to respond to them before it gets published, or finalized, I guess.
NETTIE LAGACE: So that should be the next little images. The final standard, the standard is now baked. And it then goes to the topic committee-- if it's a standard, it goes to the topic committee for its approval, and then again to the voting members for their approval. And then it's published by NISO. And my little joke at the end is we maintain it so we'll say-- we have slides about that, too-- but we maintain the standard, and that is a little standard poodle getting maintained.
NETTIE LAGACE: So little known fact, there are actually two major kinds of documents that NISO creates. And tend to call it lots of things standards, but in sort of getting down to the bare bones, some of the things we publish are standards, and these are approved by ANSI. The American National Standards Institute, is our accrediting organization. And so for things that are standards like JATS, like DAISY, they go through a full ANSI process, which is somewhat formal, has forms that get filed with ANSI and might take a little bit longer, but is meant to signify consensus, balance, ability to express dissenting views, and so on.
NETTIE LAGACE: And then we produce documents which have Z39 on them. So anything that's a Z39 document is ANSI/NISO standard. And it's Z39 because that is the number of-- our number that was assigned to ANSI many years ago. So we are the Z39 committee, and that's how we label all of our documents. Whereas we also publish recommended practices, which are a little lower level, not quite as high level as the standards, although they do follow basically the same process, that process that I mentioned in the previous slide, creating the working group and putting together the output.
NETTIE LAGACE: It's approved by the topic committee and doesn't go through ANSI approval, and we publish it as an RP. So we've been publishing a lot of those, as there a little quicker to get out to people. As long as it's adopted, I think that's the most important piece. We also have a fairly major role in engaging internationally. So our name might be a little bit misleading.
NETTIE LAGACE: We actually do have a lot of international activity, and 20% of our members are outside the US. So the idea is that when you-- it's a big world, and we all are feeling a little bit in our homes these days. It's hard to imagine a big world, but we will be out there one day, and we certainly are communicating virtually very well.
NETTIE LAGACE: And it's nice to be all together through the internet. But we do realize that there's a lot more than just our home. So the bigger, the more global the community, the more standards you need because there's more people communicating and more things to get done. So that's the main premise behind the need to engage internationally. It is not enough just to be working on a national level, you need to be working with people outside the outside of your own country, and NISO definitely does that.
NETTIE LAGACE: So our engagement is a couple of different ways. One is through ISO, the International Standards Organization, although the ISO is actually an acronym for the French terms for that. There is a technical committee, also numbered, because that's the way big organizations organize their groups, is numbers. And this technical committee handles everything in ISO pertaining to information and documentation.
NETTIE LAGACE: In this grouping of technical committee, there are five subcommittees that handle subsets of that information and documentation area. So they have numbers, and I won't get into why they are not numbered sequentially, but they just have their numbers. And they all handle different active areas. So interoperability, so things like circulation, ILL is in SC 4.
NETTIE LAGACE: Statistics and performance evaluation-- so assessment statistics, SC 8. Identification and description-- so identifiers, that's SC 9, and NISO has a special role to play in SC 9. Storage and preservation, very important, SC 10, and archives and records management, often more for businesses, corporations, that sort of thing, SC 11.
NETTIE LAGACE: So this technical committee is very active all year round. And there are meetings that take place of the different working groups, and then a plenary meeting once a year that involves everyone. NISO has, as I mentioned, a special role to play with SC nine, the identification and description subgroup of-- sorry SC 9 is identifiers. And yes, identifiers and description-- and we have the secretariat.
NETTIE LAGACE: So that means that we run the show. We run the work. We manage all of the standards that are getting published in this particular area of ISO work, and also manage the working groups that are underway at any given time. And then provide reports on that, make sure that there's enough input, that things are moving according to the ISO tracks and the ISO schedule.
NETTIE LAGACE: So this is a slide, which just describes the different areas within SC 9. And in particular, SC 9 is interesting because of its identifier work. And identifiers in the networked digital age are very important pieces to get information to people, to connect information, to make sure that things are identified as they ought to be in whatever context they are created.
NETTIE LAGACE: So this is a list of the types of the identifiers that are managed in SC 9. You can see it includes DOIs, ISBNs, library item identifiers, ISSN, ISMN, all kinds of different identifiers for information products are managed in SC 9's portfolio. And so we are secretariat for SC 9, which, as I said, running SC 9, but then in particular, we represent US interests for all of those subcommittees, all of that activity in TC 46, we represent the United States.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we present the United States vote on particular ISO standards and input for decisions moving forward for TC 46. And then also, relatively recently, we have begun participating in another ISO group, which is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 34, which handles document processing languages-- so things like Open Office, EPUB, other kinds of work that way.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as we have alluded, it is not enough just to publish a standard and put it on the shelf. Information in our world is constantly changing. People are moving forward in developing new solutions to new problems, and all kinds of different touchpoints are modified as we move forward in time, so standards cannot be static, either, and it is very important to maintain your work.
NETTIE LAGACE: So for almost everything we do, we also have groups that are responsible for maintaining making decisions about updating the things we do. So kind of similar to your car. If you have a car, I hope you are maintaining it. I just brought my car to the shop the other day for some maintenance which was a little overdue.
NETTIE LAGACE: And it's really important to keep your car running, and it's the same thing for your standards or your technology. You wouldn't want to be letting things sort of go off on their own, and then it's too late to fix, or expensive to fix, or complicated to fix. It is much better to keep on top of those things. Same thing for standards. So standards are changing as we are all changing.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as publishers, libraries, other stakeholders are adapting their work, providing new products, trying to access new audiences, the standards that they're using need to adapt, too. So that is a really important piece of our work, is making sure that these are updated as well. So that's a lot of what we're doing. But so who's all doing this?
NETTIE LAGACE: I can tell you it is not Todd and me-- or it's not just Todd and me. We could not possibly do all the things that NISO does by ourselves, or even a fraction of the things that NISO does. One of the most fulfilling pieces of my job-- I can speak for myself-- is that I get to work with so many different people volunteering to be experts on the NISO projects, NISO topic committees, NISO-- I'm sure, all the other areas of NISO work-- standards, education, programs, thought leadership meetings, all kinds of things.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we are really, I think very broad based, and this is just a sampling of the working groups. And that's the area that I'm most familiar with, is-- this is just a few screenshots of the different rosters. I'm sure it's very small for you on your screen, but what I want to highlight is that we are working very hard to make sure that working groups are balanced across stakeholders, that we are inviting as many different types of stakeholders, and voices, and ideas to the table as possible for all of our projects.
NETTIE LAGACE: So I really want to say thanks to everyone who has participated in NISO so far, and invite more participation from all of you. People like you, I hope. And that is really-- that's really how we get our work done, is from all of the input, all of the ideas, all of the excellent, excellent volunteer work that's provided.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as I said, we really do feel that it's important to have as many voices as possible. So we're working very hard on increasing diversity, and mainly because it makes a better product. It makes a better output. If you have those kinds of input from different people, different experiences in your process, you will be able to create something that is more effective in the end.
NETTIE LAGACE: And as the slide says, we really don't feel that we are a one-size-fits-all. We want to be able to make effective solutions for as many different audiences as possible. And as part of that, everyone needs to be able to say something about it as it's being made. So just a few examples, this is little case study of some people who are working on NISO projects, or even how NISO projects got started.
NETTIE LAGACE: On the left is Violaine Iglesias from Cadmore Media. And on the right is Athena Hoeppner from the University of Central Florida. Both these women saw problems in their own areas. So Violaine works in media, in video, in producing information. And Athena is a librarian. She's an electronic resources discovery librarian. And she-- you could say she's a consumer of information, but they both had different problems in their work that they thought, this is something that a community could solve.
NETTIE LAGACE: Violaine had an idea for what is now the video and audio metadata working group, and brought it as a work proposal to NISO. And Athena had an idea for the content platform migrations working group, which is now completing a draft for circulation soon, I hope. And both Athena and Violaine brought their ideas forward to NISO, put together proposals, and developed them, and are now serving as cochairs for their respective working groups.
NETTIE LAGACE: So if you have an idea, push it forward-- bring it. We want to find solutions. So with that, getting involved, all kinds of different ways. As I said, when we create documents, a big-- an important piece of that is public review. So we will circulate our documents for public review, 30 days, 45 days-- in a pandemic, it's a little longer.
NETTIE LAGACE: People need a little longer to get to look at something. And we reach out to different communities for review of that. As I said, as previous slide, please share your ideas for where you think there might be something that a community could work on together to solve a problem. Join a working group-- so when we have new projects, we will announce them and have calls for participation to invite people to join. Standing committees are the maintenance groups, and there's all kinds of availability on those.
NETTIE LAGACE: And then other committees-- so the education committee helps Jill O'Neill, our director of content, put together the webinars and the virtual conferences. The topic committees or the leadership groups which have the working groups underneath them. So there's all kinds of different possibilities for participation. We do hope you will be enthused to get involved.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. So that draws our session to a close. And I want to stress again some of the things that Nettie said about ideas. This NISO Plus conference is a forum for ideas. Hopefully, you will have some opportunity during the conference to share your ideas, share your problems, discuss with your friends and colleagues about potential solutions, and you'll be able to take advantage of the NISO development process to get broader input and ideas of how you can take some of those problems and turn them into solutions, and turn those solutions into standards which are adopted across the world.
TODD CARPENTER: We are here to help. As Nettie said, we certainly are not the people who are driving the development of NISO standards or the adoption of NISO standards. There are seven of us on the NISO staff, and we work as hard as we can, but we could not possibly get anything done at the scale at which we do at NISO without your contributions, without your support, and your involvement.
TODD CARPENTER: But we are here to help you and in getting that project, or that process, or those standards out and get them developed. If you have any questions, any concerns, any comments, want more information, would like to join NISO, we would love to speak to you. Our contact information is here. You can also reach us on social media in a variety of forms. You can go to the NISO website, that NISO Plus website.
TODD CARPENTER: We are all over the place, and we certainly want to hear from you. So with that, we will draw today's-- this session to a close. I hope you enjoy the rest of the NISO Plus conference. And I hope that you not only take something away from what we do, but I hope that you have the opportunity to give something to the community in this process. So with that, thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your time.
NETTIE LAGACE: Thanks.
TODD CARPENTER: Bye-bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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TODD CARPENTER: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Todd Carpenter. I'm the executive director of NISO and we're going to be going through the session, Engaging with NISO, How and Why. Joining me today is Nettie Lagace.
NETTIE LAGACE: Hi, everybody. I'm Nettie. I'm the associate executive director at NISO, and very happy to be here at NISO Plus.
TODD CARPENTER: Fantastic. Thank you all for joining us at NISO Plus. I hope you're enjoying the conference. We're going to go through a brief outline of what we're going to be talking about today. An introduction to standards, standards distribution, and standards and information exchange. We'll take you a little bit through the process-- so, I have an idea.
TODD CARPENTER: How does it become a standard? And then we'll tell you about all things NISO. How we get things done, how we engage internationally, the important role that maintenance plays in our work, who does things at NISO, and also, we'll end with how to keep in touch. So if at any time you have any questions about what we're talking about, if you have any questions about NISO generally, you can use the Q&A feature and the Zoom interface if you're watching this live.
TODD CARPENTER: Or you can type in questions into the NISO Discourse, where I'm sure there will be a thread for conversations about all things NISO. So if you look around probably any room that you're in, you will see lots and lots of standards. If you look at the electrical plugs, those are standardized. If you're in a traditional office building-- which many of us might not be right now-- you might see an Exit sign, fire protection methods, all of these things are standardized.
TODD CARPENTER: Standards pervade our lives. And there are essentially two ways to discuss information standards. We could talk in angle brackets and code, metadata fields and XML. There might be a few of you who enjoy talking in angle brackets, but I'm going to trust that many of you watching this presentation don't. The second way that we could talk about standards is kind of along these lines.
TODD CARPENTER: This is a great book by Randall Munroe. He's the cartoonist who does at the xkcd cartoon series. He came out with a book last year called The Thing Explainer, which uses very simple words to describe very complicated things. I like to think that we won't talk down to you like that. We're going to kind of take a third path, which is somewhere in between angle brackets and single-syllable words to describe the process of standards, how standards exist, and what NISO does and our role in that process.
TODD CARPENTER: So content distribution was actually one of the first industrial processes, back 500, 600 years ago, as we started to move away from handwritten texts to laying out texts in manufacturing facilities or print shots. The people who are producing those texts started to create processes and build standards around those processes.
TODD CARPENTER: We didn't think of them as standards. There wasn't Z39 committees to produce those standards. But they certainly were standards. And we applied those in different ways. This is a photo of-- from the Gutenberg Museum for the history of publishing in Mainz, Germany. And it shows the ways in which you can bind together signatures.
TODD CARPENTER: Actually, I was there prior to the Frankfurt Book Fair a number of years ago, and I saw this amazing example of a bound book that had nothing but pages of three, four, like column after column after column of single numbers. You could imagine it was sort of the printing master getting frustrated with his apprentice one day after he miscut the pages are misbound the book in some way.
TODD CARPENTER: Like, I'm going to teach you how to do this, and you're going to do it. It was hundreds of pages of nothing but numbers bound together so that you can figure out how to number the signatures. Page numbering actually solved a production problem. Prior to the implementation of page numbers, people used to write notes on the edges of pages. Usually, it was the word from the previous page so that when the book was bound, people who were doing that binding could identify, this is the last page in that signature, and this is the next page in the next, because most of the people doing the book production at the time didn't know how to read.
TODD CARPENTER: So how do you ensure that the book is numbered correctly? Well, you put numbers in them. Most people recognize numbers, most people recognize the order of those numbers. You didn't have to read the text to tell that the book was bound. We, today, hundreds of years later, find page numbers an extremely efficient way of getting to a page.
TODD CARPENTER: But it really was a production problem that was solved by a standard. Standards in publishing, standards in content creation, have become so ubiquitous in our environment that they've entered our common lexicon. In old print shops-- this is a photo of how type was laid out. And printers used far fewer of the upper case letters-- they used capital letters.
TODD CARPENTER: They were further away than the lower case letters, which you used more of. So it became part of the parlance that a capital letter was in the upper case because it was further away than the lowercase letters which used more of-- the lower case, which was below. As a matter of fact, our use of English language, or any other language, most of which had centuries of existence prior to being written down, the spelling of words has become standardized over time.
TODD CARPENTER: This is why even in American English, we spell color without a U, and in British or Canadian English, spell it with a U. Ben Franklin in the 18th century came up with his own scheme as model for revising spelling. It didn't go anywhere. It's an example of a standard for information distribution that got created and someone finished it, published a book about it, but it never got adopted.
TODD CARPENTER: So there's a long history of standards in our space, both in how we communicate, as well as successful things that have been implemented, like page numbers and uppercase and lowercase, and things which didn't quite get the same level of adoption. And these standards exist to this day. I often use ISBN as an example of like, what does Todd do, when I'm asked.
TODD CARPENTER: And I respond, well, you know the bar code on the back of a book? Those little numbers, ISBNs? Most people recognize that. Most people don't think about what is meant by an ISBN, how it works, how the systems are used for interchange, anything like that, but they are aware that books have barcodes on the back of them, and that barcode is known as an ISBN.
TODD CARPENTER: These standards grease the wheels of information creation, curation, dissemination, discovery, and preservation. And they're involved in every aspect of taking work created by someone from the research that they do to come up with their ideas, the writing of those words and submitting that to a publisher. The editorial process that crafts the author's work, bringing it into production, and printing or electronic distribution, out through the sales channels to libraries or bookstores, methods of access control, digital rights management discovery, and into the hands of readers.
TODD CARPENTER: So standards are critically important to this entire process of getting something out of the mind of a creative individual and getting it into the mind of a reader. So I'm going to talk next about how we create these standards. Where do these things come from? They all start with a problem. We're having a problem.
TODD CARPENTER: I'm binding papers together and I want to make sure they're in order. I'm having trouble moving a manuscript from one place to another. I'm having trouble describing the subject headings of a book or an article. That is my problem. We collectively are having that problem. How do we solve that problem?
TODD CARPENTER: How do we move it from a problem to a solution? So you might have one of those solutions. You might have that great idea. For improving metadata, you might have that great idea of the next great standard. What do you do with that? How do you get it out of your environment and into the community? I think it's really important, first of all, to think about, what are the benefits of why you might want this idea that you have, this problem that you have, why you might want it to be a community initiative, a standard.
TODD CARPENTER: That process has a lot of benefits both before or during the process of standardization of consensus development. And also after it's finished, and have I put "finished" in air quotes there-- or actually, actual quotes-- because standards really aren't finished. They evolve, and we'll talk a little bit about how they evolve later. But we'll take finished to mean we've come to consensus and we've agreed on it.
TODD CARPENTER: So in the before times, as we're developing consensus around a project, what are the benefits of the process of why you might want something to be a standard and why you might want to go through that process? The first is development support. More people looking at the project and the solution that you have will make it better. Community input, not just from the members of the working group, but the broader community who is looking at this issue and this problem.
TODD CARPENTER: There are also benefits to having a diverse community look at the problem because they might test features in a way, they might explore the product or the solution in a way that you hadn't because you have your own particular approach or problem that you're trying to solve. Another issue is the limitations of scope that can be put by an external party. You might want to not have solved that problem.
TODD CARPENTER: The community might want to solve a core problem. And having a third party say, well, this is the scope that we want to solve, alleviates some of that pressure on you. There's also issues of certification and accreditation. Like this is validated by NISO, by ISO, by ANSI. And it has a certain weight. There is also a benefit of promotion and outreach that this is becoming a bigger thing than your own project.
TODD CARPENTER: And that has a lot of value in terms of drawing attention towards it. Then there are issues about after the project has reached consensus, there are values and there's benefits to having done an a NISO standard, or an ISO standard, or an ANSI standard. The first is ongoing maintenance. As I said things, aren't ever finished. So we, NISO, are responsible for continuous maintenance of our projects.
TODD CARPENTER: We try to avoid putting things out, leaving them on the shelf and ignoring them because if people are using them, people will find problems, people will notice the changes going on in the community, and they'll demand, essentially, that things get fixed. We, NISO, provide an ongoing point of contact. Even as project management changes, as staffing changes at corporations, who might be responsible, NISO is the sort of institutional memory, if you will, of projects going forward.
TODD CARPENTER: We also provide a communication touchpoint for the community. Say if you developed your own project, people are always going to come knocking on your door to solve whatever issues exist in the standard that you've developed. There are benefits to having a third party take that off of you in that you separate the maintenance of this thing, the standard, from your own product, your own service.
TODD CARPENTER: People might get mad at the standard. They don't get mad at your company for maintaining the standard in a way that they don't like. They get mad at NISO. And we are also responsible, and we are actively pursuing promotion and outreach of the standards that we develop. Now this is not a perfect situation. There are pros and cons.
TODD CARPENTER: So some things to consider if you're bringing your project to NISO, if you want to make your standard a community project. The first is it could take longer. You can often get things done faster if you do them yourselves. Part of the consensus development process is having many eyes on things. People raise things that you might not have known are problems.
TODD CARPENTER: Solving those problems takes a little longer. The slide is wrong here-- we'll fix it. Community development might not solve your issue. It might not solve every problem that you have. Your problem might not be the priority of the group. And things that you-- it's your project, you can focus attention where you want on your issues.
TODD CARPENTER: But if it's a consensus project, your issues might not be the top of the priority list. So oftentimes, there is also with larger projects, a need to avoid those many interested parties from making the problem bigger and bigger and bigger. It's called scope creep. How do we avoid that? Because you might be trying to solve this particular problem, but the community has this big problem.
TODD CARPENTER: A community project is also no longer yours. It's not yours to control. Your voice is no longer privileged above everyone else's. It's the community's, which is good things and bad things. And if it's your thing, and you own it, and you take care of it, and you make sure everything is satisfied with it to your specification, to your particular demand, then in a community development project, you're one of a community.
TODD CARPENTER: And that's important to understand before entering this process. So next we're going to talk all about NISO. What is NISO? How does it work? How is the community developed? And for this point of the presentation, I'm going to pass it over to Nettie, and she can take it from here.
NETTIE LAGACE: All right. So my work is a lot about the day-to-day stuff that goes on at NISO, so I'll be explaining that. So we have some overarching principles, I guess you would say, that guide our work at NISO. And these are words that we developed with our board and our communities, and I think they really help to guide us in all the things we do. So overall, our vision is a world where everyone benefits from the unfettered exchange of information.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we want to make sure that information can be moved around, shared between parties. And we have a mission statement. Our mission as an organization is to build knowledge, foster discussion between parties, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we are a standards organization, and that's what we do. But in order to build those standards, of course, we need knowledge and discussion to create those. And moving down a few levels-- or a level-- we have some core values. So one of the core values-- and there are three-- one is engagement.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we enable libraries, publishers, and vendors-- these are our primary audiences. We're not limited to these stakeholders, but these are the ones that are our core stakeholders. We enable them to collaborate and solve problems of mutual interest by providing a neutral forum in which they can engage and build consensus. So we see ourselves very much as a, you could say, a Switzerland, a place where no entity is favored over another, and the playing field is level, and people can discuss together to reach the points where they agree, hopefully.
NETTIE LAGACE: Interoperability, so really, one of our core values, making sure that parties can enjoy choice and efficiency. And what we do is promote interoperability of information through standards and best practices. So wherever it's possible for products and services to interact, that's the areas where we see our sweet spot in creating tools that enable this interaction.
NETTIE LAGACE: And then, of course, education. We really need to lift all boats and make sure that everyone's in the know. So we work very hard, and a core piece of our work is to keep our community up to date by publishing news. You'll see all kinds of ways for us to get that information out there. Running educational programs, our webinars and virtual conferences are a really excellent piece of our work.
NETTIE LAGACE: And providing thought leadership periodic meetings or meetings like this one, where we engage people and bring out the discussions. So participating in NISO-- we've got, as I said a few slides ago, the core groups are libraries, publishers, and systems vendors, but it's really much broader than that. Really, I would say anyone who has an interest in the kinds of things that we're working on is welcome.
NETTIE LAGACE: If you are someone or some party that's affected by one of our standards or recommended practices, we do want you to participate. And so this is a slide which just shows the core groups, but then other standards development organizations are participating in our work, which is kind of cool. Subscription agents, content aggregators, book publishers, associations of all sorts, consultants who work with different organizations, and archives, and museums.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as I said-- as we said, neutrality is really key. And it's kind of nice to be thinking of traveling these days, and being like Switzerland, or being in Switzerland, but we do take seriously the fact that we are neutral. I really have to say I enjoy that part of my job that I'm a friend to all and I help everyone.
NETTIE LAGACE: So NISO, we hope you know that we create and maintain standards and best practices, or recommended practices, as we call them. We foster the adoption-- that's key. It doesn't really help if you create something if nobody uses it. So we want to make sure that people know about our standards and have tools to implement them where they are. And then also educate the community.
NETTIE LAGACE: So not just standards, but information and technology topics across the board. Anything that fits in, it's part of our scope. And then incubating thought leadership activities to advance the technology. So bring people together, get them talking, get ideas percolating and circulated. So we've got lots of-- this is only a subset of the publications that we have.
NETTIE LAGACE: And they are listed on our website, so if you were curious about all the things we do. I hope that at least a few things on this list are things that if you're not familiar with, you would feel affect you in your work. I have a background as a librarian, so I actually-- OpenURL was the first standard that I knew of, and it was core in my work, and it still is. KBART is a recommended practice which transfers information from knowledge bases-- publishers to knowledge bases.
NETTIE LAGACE: JATS is a core standard for publishers to make their information-- their publication information data about their articles available to a number of different tools. And we also do things like privacy policies, helping people understand policies. RA21 moved into seamless access, access control, authorization, authentication, and so on.
NETTIE LAGACE: So really a broad range, and that's also something that's a nice feature of NISO, is that it's lots of things for lots of people. But at the core of it, no matter what we are working on, we want to connect the different pieces together. So if you are one party that needs to connect to another, that is a good place for you to be here at NISO, putting things together.
NETTIE LAGACE: And moving on. So here we are at NISO Plus, and talking about what we're doing and how we're getting our work done. So getting our work done, that's my job. That's really my day to day, is moving things along. And so I'll be talking about how that's done. So-- oops-- one more-- there. So all of those projects that you saw in that list of publications were once a working group, and-- or we've got a lot of working groups underway right now that are working on all kinds of different things in all kinds of different areas.
NETTIE LAGACE: But these are sorted into three areas that we call our topic committees. We have named them similarly, but ICC is the Information Creation and Curation topic committee, and it has a portfolio of standards and recommended practices and working groups that are core to things like metadata, where information is born, where information is created, where information is first published.
NETTIE LAGACE: So metadata, publishing tools, that sort of thing. Information Discovery and Interchange is the second topic committee, or another topic committee, and it's, as its name says, is where information is connected. So discovery of information interfaces circulation, like transferring of information, those kinds of projects are part of that topic committee.
NETTIE LAGACE: Information and Policy and Analysis topic committee handles things that are policy analysis. So assessment, or licensing, or business rules, that sort of thing. Projects that are in those areas are in the portfolio of that topic committee. So these topic committees are made up of people in the industry, people-- volunteers, a lot like you, and we'll say a few words about that.
NETTIE LAGACE: And they may help-- they manage the decisions around these. They approve the projects and approve the publications on the way to being published by NISO. And then above that, we have an architecture committee which is made up of the co-chairs of each of those topic committees along with liaisons from our board of directors. And our board of directors is the-- as you can see, top of the chain, as in most organizations, where they make the overall decisions about the organization and the decisions about the projects.
NETTIE LAGACE: And the other work is done by the architecture committee and the topic committees, who also help us with strategy and decisions on what kinds of things we should be pursuing. So this is a little animation. And I-- we'll see how the animation goes in this context, but I just wanted to say a few words about how standards are created in hopefully a fun way. This is a clipart version of the standards creation process.
NETTIE LAGACE: So Todd talked about when you-- why you would want to bring an idea to NISO. And this is what happens when you do bring an idea to NISO. So someone has an idea about a problem they want to have solved. They create a digital proposal about it, really just a short proposal, two pages of what the problem is and how it might be solved through a standard.
NETTIE LAGACE: And we help with that, we have templates and tools. And they send it to NISO. It goes to one of those topic committees that you saw on the previous slide. They discuss it. They might have questions for the proposer. And hopefully, if they agree with it, they will stamp it approved. It then goes to our voting members who have a 30-day online ballot to look at it, to consider it, to maybe circulate it around their organizations, hopefully vote to approve it, and maybe also nominate people to serve on a working group.
NETTIE LAGACE: Next button. Then we create a working group. So we put out a call for participation, and try to make sure the working group is balanced among stakeholders. So all of those types of stakeholders that you saw, we want to make sure that everyone has a voice and a seat as applicable to the problem at hand. And the working group starts working and discusses the problem.
NETTIE LAGACE: They might run surveys, or do research outside of their group, or different ways of putting together a solution to the problem. And then they create a draft, which we circulate for public comment. That's a core piece of our process, is making sure that people outside the working group have access to something before it's published so that they can react to it, maybe put it into a test mode to see how it might work in their own situation, and then send comments back to the working group who has to respond to them before it gets published, or finalized, I guess.
NETTIE LAGACE: So that should be the next little images. The final standard, the standard is now baked. And it then goes to the topic committee-- if it's a standard, it goes to the topic committee for its approval, and then again to the voting members for their approval. And then it's published by NISO. And my little joke at the end is we maintain it so we'll say-- we have slides about that, too-- but we maintain the standard, and that is a little standard poodle getting maintained.
NETTIE LAGACE: So little known fact, there are actually two major kinds of documents that NISO creates. And tend to call it lots of things standards, but in sort of getting down to the bare bones, some of the things we publish are standards, and these are approved by ANSI. The American National Standards Institute, is our accrediting organization. And so for things that are standards like JATS, like DAISY, they go through a full ANSI process, which is somewhat formal, has forms that get filed with ANSI and might take a little bit longer, but is meant to signify consensus, balance, ability to express dissenting views, and so on.
NETTIE LAGACE: And then we produce documents which have Z39 on them. So anything that's a Z39 document is ANSI/NISO standard. And it's Z39 because that is the number of-- our number that was assigned to ANSI many years ago. So we are the Z39 committee, and that's how we label all of our documents. Whereas we also publish recommended practices, which are a little lower level, not quite as high level as the standards, although they do follow basically the same process, that process that I mentioned in the previous slide, creating the working group and putting together the output.
NETTIE LAGACE: It's approved by the topic committee and doesn't go through ANSI approval, and we publish it as an RP. So we've been publishing a lot of those, as there a little quicker to get out to people. As long as it's adopted, I think that's the most important piece. We also have a fairly major role in engaging internationally. So our name might be a little bit misleading.
NETTIE LAGACE: We actually do have a lot of international activity, and 20% of our members are outside the US. So the idea is that when you-- it's a big world, and we all are feeling a little bit in our homes these days. It's hard to imagine a big world, but we will be out there one day, and we certainly are communicating virtually very well.
NETTIE LAGACE: And it's nice to be all together through the internet. But we do realize that there's a lot more than just our home. So the bigger, the more global the community, the more standards you need because there's more people communicating and more things to get done. So that's the main premise behind the need to engage internationally. It is not enough just to be working on a national level, you need to be working with people outside the outside of your own country, and NISO definitely does that.
NETTIE LAGACE: So our engagement is a couple of different ways. One is through ISO, the International Standards Organization, although the ISO is actually an acronym for the French terms for that. There is a technical committee, also numbered, because that's the way big organizations organize their groups, is numbers. And this technical committee handles everything in ISO pertaining to information and documentation.
NETTIE LAGACE: In this grouping of technical committee, there are five subcommittees that handle subsets of that information and documentation area. So they have numbers, and I won't get into why they are not numbered sequentially, but they just have their numbers. And they all handle different active areas. So interoperability, so things like circulation, ILL is in SC 4.
NETTIE LAGACE: Statistics and performance evaluation-- so assessment statistics, SC 8. Identification and description-- so identifiers, that's SC 9, and NISO has a special role to play in SC 9. Storage and preservation, very important, SC 10, and archives and records management, often more for businesses, corporations, that sort of thing, SC 11.
NETTIE LAGACE: So this technical committee is very active all year round. And there are meetings that take place of the different working groups, and then a plenary meeting once a year that involves everyone. NISO has, as I mentioned, a special role to play with SC nine, the identification and description subgroup of-- sorry SC 9 is identifiers. And yes, identifiers and description-- and we have the secretariat.
NETTIE LAGACE: So that means that we run the show. We run the work. We manage all of the standards that are getting published in this particular area of ISO work, and also manage the working groups that are underway at any given time. And then provide reports on that, make sure that there's enough input, that things are moving according to the ISO tracks and the ISO schedule.
NETTIE LAGACE: So this is a slide, which just describes the different areas within SC 9. And in particular, SC 9 is interesting because of its identifier work. And identifiers in the networked digital age are very important pieces to get information to people, to connect information, to make sure that things are identified as they ought to be in whatever context they are created.
NETTIE LAGACE: So this is a list of the types of the identifiers that are managed in SC 9. You can see it includes DOIs, ISBNs, library item identifiers, ISSN, ISMN, all kinds of different identifiers for information products are managed in SC 9's portfolio. And so we are secretariat for SC 9, which, as I said, running SC 9, but then in particular, we represent US interests for all of those subcommittees, all of that activity in TC 46, we represent the United States.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we present the United States vote on particular ISO standards and input for decisions moving forward for TC 46. And then also, relatively recently, we have begun participating in another ISO group, which is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 34, which handles document processing languages-- so things like Open Office, EPUB, other kinds of work that way.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as we have alluded, it is not enough just to publish a standard and put it on the shelf. Information in our world is constantly changing. People are moving forward in developing new solutions to new problems, and all kinds of different touchpoints are modified as we move forward in time, so standards cannot be static, either, and it is very important to maintain your work.
NETTIE LAGACE: So for almost everything we do, we also have groups that are responsible for maintaining making decisions about updating the things we do. So kind of similar to your car. If you have a car, I hope you are maintaining it. I just brought my car to the shop the other day for some maintenance which was a little overdue.
NETTIE LAGACE: And it's really important to keep your car running, and it's the same thing for your standards or your technology. You wouldn't want to be letting things sort of go off on their own, and then it's too late to fix, or expensive to fix, or complicated to fix. It is much better to keep on top of those things. Same thing for standards. So standards are changing as we are all changing.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as publishers, libraries, other stakeholders are adapting their work, providing new products, trying to access new audiences, the standards that they're using need to adapt, too. So that is a really important piece of our work, is making sure that these are updated as well. So that's a lot of what we're doing. But so who's all doing this?
NETTIE LAGACE: I can tell you it is not Todd and me-- or it's not just Todd and me. We could not possibly do all the things that NISO does by ourselves, or even a fraction of the things that NISO does. One of the most fulfilling pieces of my job-- I can speak for myself-- is that I get to work with so many different people volunteering to be experts on the NISO projects, NISO topic committees, NISO-- I'm sure, all the other areas of NISO work-- standards, education, programs, thought leadership meetings, all kinds of things.
NETTIE LAGACE: So we are really, I think very broad based, and this is just a sampling of the working groups. And that's the area that I'm most familiar with, is-- this is just a few screenshots of the different rosters. I'm sure it's very small for you on your screen, but what I want to highlight is that we are working very hard to make sure that working groups are balanced across stakeholders, that we are inviting as many different types of stakeholders, and voices, and ideas to the table as possible for all of our projects.
NETTIE LAGACE: So I really want to say thanks to everyone who has participated in NISO so far, and invite more participation from all of you. People like you, I hope. And that is really-- that's really how we get our work done, is from all of the input, all of the ideas, all of the excellent, excellent volunteer work that's provided.
NETTIE LAGACE: So as I said, we really do feel that it's important to have as many voices as possible. So we're working very hard on increasing diversity, and mainly because it makes a better product. It makes a better output. If you have those kinds of input from different people, different experiences in your process, you will be able to create something that is more effective in the end.
NETTIE LAGACE: And as the slide says, we really don't feel that we are a one-size-fits-all. We want to be able to make effective solutions for as many different audiences as possible. And as part of that, everyone needs to be able to say something about it as it's being made. So just a few examples, this is little case study of some people who are working on NISO projects, or even how NISO projects got started.
NETTIE LAGACE: On the left is Violaine Iglesias from Cadmore Media. And on the right is Athena Hoeppner from the University of Central Florida. Both these women saw problems in their own areas. So Violaine works in media, in video, in producing information. And Athena is a librarian. She's an electronic resources discovery librarian. And she-- you could say she's a consumer of information, but they both had different problems in their work that they thought, this is something that a community could solve.
NETTIE LAGACE: Violaine had an idea for what is now the video and audio metadata working group, and brought it as a work proposal to NISO. And Athena had an idea for the content platform migrations working group, which is now completing a draft for circulation soon, I hope. And both Athena and Violaine brought their ideas forward to NISO, put together proposals, and developed them, and are now serving as cochairs for their respective working groups.
NETTIE LAGACE: So if you have an idea, push it forward-- bring it. We want to find solutions. So with that, getting involved, all kinds of different ways. As I said, when we create documents, a big-- an important piece of that is public review. So we will circulate our documents for public review, 30 days, 45 days-- in a pandemic, it's a little longer.
NETTIE LAGACE: People need a little longer to get to look at something. And we reach out to different communities for review of that. As I said, as previous slide, please share your ideas for where you think there might be something that a community could work on together to solve a problem. Join a working group-- so when we have new projects, we will announce them and have calls for participation to invite people to join. Standing committees are the maintenance groups, and there's all kinds of availability on those.
NETTIE LAGACE: And then other committees-- so the education committee helps Jill O'Neill, our director of content, put together the webinars and the virtual conferences. The topic committees or the leadership groups which have the working groups underneath them. So there's all kinds of different possibilities for participation. We do hope you will be enthused to get involved.
TODD CARPENTER: Yeah. So that draws our session to a close. And I want to stress again some of the things that Nettie said about ideas. This NISO Plus conference is a forum for ideas. Hopefully, you will have some opportunity during the conference to share your ideas, share your problems, discuss with your friends and colleagues about potential solutions, and you'll be able to take advantage of the NISO development process to get broader input and ideas of how you can take some of those problems and turn them into solutions, and turn those solutions into standards which are adopted across the world.
TODD CARPENTER: We are here to help. As Nettie said, we certainly are not the people who are driving the development of NISO standards or the adoption of NISO standards. There are seven of us on the NISO staff, and we work as hard as we can, but we could not possibly get anything done at the scale at which we do at NISO without your contributions, without your support, and your involvement.
TODD CARPENTER: But we are here to help you and in getting that project, or that process, or those standards out and get them developed. If you have any questions, any concerns, any comments, want more information, would like to join NISO, we would love to speak to you. Our contact information is here. You can also reach us on social media in a variety of forms. You can go to the NISO website, that NISO Plus website.
TODD CARPENTER: We are all over the place, and we certainly want to hear from you. So with that, we will draw today's-- this session to a close. I hope you enjoy the rest of the NISO Plus conference. And I hope that you not only take something away from what we do, but I hope that you have the opportunity to give something to the community in this process. So with that, thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your time.
NETTIE LAGACE: Thanks.
TODD CARPENTER: Bye-bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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