[Web4lib] UKSG and NISO announce first endorsers of KBART Recommended Practice

[Cynthia Hodgson]

New KBART Phase II Working Group and Co-Chairs Also Revealed

June 1, 2010 - Baltimore, MD and Newbury, UK - UKSG and NISO are pleased to
announce that the American Institute of Physics, Ex Libris, Serials
Solutions and OCLC are the first organizations to publicly endorse the Phase
I recommendations of the KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working
Group, a joint initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL
supply chain. KBART's Phase I Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2010),
published in January 2010, contains practical recommendations for the timely
exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base
developers. A number of other major organizations in the scholarly
information supply chain are also working towards KBART endorsement.

All content providers, from major databases to small publishers, are
encouraged to publicly endorse the KBART Recommended Practice by submitting
a sample file to the KBART working group. Once the file's format and content
has been reviewed and approved, and the provider has made it publicly
available (in line with the recommendations), the provider will be added to
a public list of endorsing providers. Knowledge base developers can endorse
the KBART Recommended Practice by confirming that their systems can process
KBART formatted files. In addition, a contacts registry is now available on
the KBART Information Hub at http://www.uksg.org/kbart or
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart where content providers and knowledge
base developers can register their organization's information for
downloading holdings metadata. 

Sarah Pearson, KBART co-chair and E-Resources & Serials Coordinator at the
University of Birmingham, comments: "It's an indication of the importance of
KBART's work, and the ease with which the Recommended Practice can be
adopted, that major knowledge base vendors - such as Serials Solutions in
their KnowledgeWorks program, Ex Libris in their Publisher Relationship
Program and OCLC in their WorldCat knowledge base harvesting program - have
already recognized our phase I guidelines. And it's fitting that AIP, which
has a history of leadership in journal publishing and reference linking
technologies, is the first publisher to provide metadata files that adhere
to KBART's recommendations."

The KBART working group is now progressing to Phase II, with a largely new
set of volunteers:

. Andreas Biedenbach, Springer Science+Business Media (NISO co-chair)
. Sarah Pearson, University of Birmingham (UKSG co-chair)
. Sherrard Ewing, Serials Solutions
. Marieke Heins, Swets
. Chad Hutchens, University of Wyoming
. Mathew Llewellin, The Royal Society
. Sheri Meares, EBSCO
. Paul Moss, OCLC
. Jason Price, Claremont Colleges / SCELC
. Rose Robinson, Publishing Technology
. Liz Stevenson, University of Edinburgh
. Christine Stohn, Ex Libris
. Ruth Wells, Taylor & Francis
. Julie Zhu, American Institute of Physics

New KBART co-chair Andreas Biedenbach, Manager of eProduct Operations for
Springer, concludes, "I am pleased to be working with our new Phase II
volunteers. We look forward to developing further guidance for all parties
involved in e-resource metadata management, which is such a critical part of
enabling access to scholarly research."

For more information on endorsement, to review the KBART Recommended
Practice, or to find out how to get involved in future phases of KBART's
work, please visit www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart. 

About KBART
KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) was set up following the 2007
publication of the UKSG research report "Link Resolvers and the Serials
Supply Chain." Central to the efficient operation of the OpenURL is the
knowledge base, which consists of data supplied by content providers
including publishers. The report found that a lack of awareness of the
OpenURLs capabilities and requirements is impacting the quality and
timeliness of data provided to populate knowledge bases, and thus
undermining the potential of the sophisticated OpenURL technology. UKSG
partnered with NISO to commission the KBART Working Group to develop
guidelines for best practice and provide educational materials. The core
NISO/UKSG Working Group consists of representatives from libraries,
knowledge base developers, publishers, intermediaries and other content
providers, and is supported by a monitoring group of interested parties. Its
Phase I report (KBART Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2010) and guidelines
have been widely reviewed and tested by a wider group of information supply
chain stakeholders. For more information, visit www.uksg.org/kbart or
www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart. 

About NISO
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate
the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of
information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To
fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information
aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and
scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of
knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across
the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit
association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org. For
more information please contact NISO on (301) 654-2512 or via email on
nisohq at niso.org.

About UKSG
UKSG exists to connect the information community and encourage the exchange
of ideas on scholarly communication. It spans the wide range of interests
and activities of the extended scholarly information community of
librarians, publishers, intermediaries and technology vendors. In a dynamic
environment, UKSG works to:
. facilitate community integration, networking, discussion and exchange of
ideas
. improve members' knowledge of the scholarly information sector and support
skills development
. stimulate research and collaborative initiatives, encourage innovation and
promote standards for good practice
. disseminate news, information and publications, and raise awareness of
services that support the scholarly information sector.

For more information, please visit the UKSG website, www.uksg.org.

For more information, please contact:

Karen Wetzel					Charlie Rapple
NISO Standards Program Manager		UKSG Marketing Officer
kwetzel at niso.org
charlie.rapple at tbicommunications.com