Several months ago, as chair of the ASIS Standards Committee, I invited all ASIS members to participate in the standards development process by reviewing NISO Z39.14 Writing Abstracts and helping the committee develop the comments and vote that ASIS would submit as a voting member of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Several members accepted my invitation, devoting a lot of time and energy to the process and providing committee members with valuable comments. We used those thoughts to develop the following paper that was submitted to NISO. I will keep the membership informed of the progression of this standard. In addition, I will once again solicit reviewers from the general membership on future votes when feasible.
At the conclusion of this article, I have provided a summary of all votes and actions that have been taken by NISO during the time I have served as chair of the ASIS Standards Committee.
If you are interested in serving on the Standards Committee, please contact me or Richard Hill at ASIS Headquarters with an indication of your interest.
ASIS is voting NO on Z39.14-199x with the following comments.
Major Comments:
"Print or on-line collections of abstracts accompanied by their bibliographic references that serve as alerting or retrospective access keys, or both, to original documents. Author abstracts are often used verbatim when they are well-written and where permitted by copyright. Otherwise, services either write original abstracts or revise the author's abstract to meet the needs of the service and on-line retrieval."[Note: in particular, delete the phrase "when the original one is inferior."]
In addition this section is very limiting. There are other purposes for having abstracts, such as to serve as an introductory overview for users who plan on reading a document, to facilitate free-text searching, to be used in abstracting and indexing databases, etc.
How about locating the abstract with the table of contents as an appropriate alternative in some cases? This is appropriate for some journals where the abstract at the beginning of the article would interfere with the style of presentation (e.g., Smithsonian Magazine). Since there is more electronic use of tables of content, the presence of the abstracts there obviously would enhance the value of such a listing.
For electronic abstracts some consideration should be given and mention made of delimiting them with standard tags or codes to facilitate the electronic handling of abstracts that are part of text files. Such delimiters would also facilitate locating abstracts, particularly in instances when the page format is nonexistent.
[Note: The use of "pamphlet" in the definition is puzzling. Also, there are forms of restricted distribution of government documents other than classification (e.g., limited distribution to non-US citizens); the statement should be broad enough to cover all such situations.]
This is one of the major flaws in the standard. It relegates all non-empirical documents to the indicative style, when, in fact, many historical, theoretical or philosophical writings would be better served by an informative abstract. This standard appears to disallow the writing of an informative abstract for any document other than one reporting on experimental work. Equal emphasis on the important elements of information to be included in an informative abstract of theoretical work should be provided.
Throughout Section 6, the standard presents "dos" and "don'ts" that are a matter of policy and should be determined by the purpose of the abstracts and how they are used. For example, in section 6.1.3 the priority list for what to do about too many results is subjective and should not be recommended universally.
The standard is unclear as to who its audience is. Although the standard states that it is intended for both abstractors who work for access services and authors, it may be unlikely that authors are familiar with many of the concepts (e.g., descriptors, identifiers) referred to. If the standard is indeed for use by authors those concepts should be explained as one cannot assume non-professionals are familiar with them.
In the last sentence, "in order" can be deleted.
Last paragraph. Amend 3rd sentence to "These statements may include essential background material and descriptions of the approaches used, aspects of the subject matter discussed or arguments presented in the text."
The second paragraph is very unclear. Here is a suggested rewriting of it:
"For the purposes of on-line retrieval, abstracts should have terminology that is (1) fully spelled out, (2) refers to the specifics of the document content, (3) places words directly adjacent to other words to represent concepts (e.g., 'middle class and working class' rather than 'middle and working class') and (4) avoids word adjacencies across punctuation that could lead to false retrieval (e.g., 'visibility through the periscope, detection of targets on sonar CRTs')."In addition an example should be provided of the standard practice of handling abbreviations the first time they are used - spell the term out the first time it is used followed by the abbreviation, then use abbreviations on subsequent uses.
Proposed reordering of the appendix:
Foreword: "Basic content must be quickly and accurately identifiable,. . ."
4.1: ". . . to identify the basic content of a document quickly and accurately; . . .
The idea of accurately portraying the content is surely implied.