Standards Committee: 2012 Activities (Last Updated 5/21/2012)

For Standards Committee Actvities for 2010 -2011 Click Here

  1. Voted REAFFIRM on Periodic Review ANSI/NISO Z39.32 - 1996, Information on Microfiche Headers

  2. Voted YES on NISO Ballot: Proposed New Work Item: Standardized Specification for Resource Synchronization

  3. Voted APPROVE to make the Finnish Standards Association the new Secratrariat of ISO TC46/SC4

  4. Voted YES on request by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to be a Liaison to ISO TC46

  5. Voted REAFFIRM on Systematic Review ISO 25577:2008, Information and documentation: MarcXchange

  6. Voted CONFIRM on Systematic Review ISO 832:1994, Information and documentation -- Bibliographic description and references -- Rules for the abbreviation of bibliographic terms

  7. Voted CONFIRM on Systematic Review ISO 15707:2001, Information and documentation -- International Standard Musical Work Code (ISWC)

  8. Voted REVISE on Systematic Review ISO/TR 15489-2, Information and documentation - Records management - Part 2: Guidelines with the comments:

    The issues raised by the Ad Hoc group are particularly obvious in ISO/TR 15489-2:2001, and it requires substantial revision to remain relevant to modern information management practices.

  9. Voted REVISE on Systematic Review ISO 15489-1, Information and documentation - Records management - Part 1: General with the Comments:

    Depending on interpretation of the level of description of both records, processes and systems, it is possible to interpret ISO 15489-1:2001 as not requiring any revision or updates as a result of the issues raised by either the Ad Hoc group or Carslile's commentary. However given that ISO/TR 15489-2:2001 is more likely to be revised, NISO votes REVISE for the core standard as it makes sense to consider changes across the two documents in the same revision process.

    Comments on ISO 15489-1 and ISO 15489-2 provided by Baden Hughes

  10. Voted REAFFIRM on Periodic Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.86 - 2005 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book

  11. Voted YES on Publishing ISO/FDIS (2nd) 27730, Information and documentation - International standard collection identifier (ISCI) as an International Standard

  12. Voted NO on Approval of Proposed New Work Item: Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) with the following comments:

    1) I (Mark Needleman) was on the NISO committee that developed NCIP - the committee specifically decided not to make SIP a NISO standard because we thought the standard used outdated technology and was limited in its capabilities - admittedly some of this may have changed in Version 3)

    2) ASIST does not believe NISO should be standardizing proprietary protocols

    3) We are also concerned about the negative impression standardizing SIP will have on the community's perception of NISO's support for NCIP

    Comments supplied by Mark Needleman

  13. Voted REAFFIRM on Periodic Review of ANSI/NISO Z39.86 - 2005 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book

  14. Voted YES on ISO/CD 2789, Information and documentation -- International library statistics to move to Draft International Standard status - with the following comment:

    Other standards for library statistics exist - eg LibQual+, and we feel its important to consider the mapping between this ISO standard and those standards (or an understanding of the differences). That other widely accepted standards for library statistics and performance measurement exist isn't acknowledged in this document.

    Comment provided by Baden Hughes

  15. Voted YES on ISO/DTR 17068, Information and documentation - Records management - Trusted third party repository for digital records - for publication as a Technical Report

  16. Voted YES on New Work Item Proposal for Revision of ISO 7098 - Documentation -- Romanization of Chinese

  17. Voted YES on New Work Item Proposal for Revision of ISO 3602:1989, Documentation -- Romanization of Japanese (kana script)

  18. Voted YES on ISO/DTR 18128, Information and documentation - Risk identification and assessment for records systems to be published as an ISO Technical Report with the following comments:

    section 5.3.1 - despite the clarifications as to the types of internal risk, it does not appear to cover the significant change of the businesses activties (eg introducing a new product or service in a non traditional area that introduces new external or internal factors re the requirements for management of records). this is not the same as the uncertainty introduced through merger, acquisition etc as itemised in the first subpoint in 5.3.1.

    section 5.4.1 - We think it would be advisable to strengthen the wording of the "reliability of systems suppliers" to explicitly cover commercial and technical viability. This dovetails into 5.4.2 as well; its about whether or not commercial systems suppliers remain in the market offering records management systems.

    section 5.5.3 - We think this should be expanded to include maintenance of metadata transformation and cross walk schema which is often performed externally and unfortunately often through a non persistent agency.

    section 7.2 - ISO 31000 should also be referenced here.

    Comments provided by Baden Hughes

  19. Voted NO on ISO/FDIS 13008, Information and documentation - Digital records conversion and migration process - with the following comments:

    While the preface does suggest the document is trying to standardize a process (and in that that there would be some value) the rest of the document doesn't do that, it talks about principles and practices for a bunch of different steps that you may (or may not) go through in the conversion and migration process.

    The document is undoubtedly useful and informative in terms of raising awareness of issue. However (in our opinion) the document does not meet the requirements for an ISO standard in that it doesn't really standardize anything. It would however make an informative ISO Technical Report.

    The only condition we could see for this becoming an ISO standard is if it is referenced by other ISO standards and thus needs to be a standard in order to meet ISO requirements.

    Comments provided by Baden Hughes and Mark Needleman

  20. Voted YES on ISO/DIS 25964-2, Information and documentation - Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies - Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies - to be published as an ISO Standard - with the following comment:

    We believe that this is another example of an ISO standard that doesn't really standardize anything and thus does not rise to the level of something that should be made an ISO standard. However, Since it lists ISO 25964-1 (which is an ISO standard) in the Normative References, it needs to be an ISO standard due to ISO requirements. But we believe it would make more sense if this was published as something like a technical report or guidelines document.

    Comment provided by Mark Needleman

  21. Provided the following Comments on ISO/IEC FDIS 17024, Conformity assessment X General requirements for bodies operating certification of persons (Note: On this voting cycle there was no opportunity to cast a vote - only to submit comments or not):

    Although we doubt that this will have any effect on the status of ISO/IEC FDIS 17024 in ISO , ASIST has decided to submit the following comments on this document:

    While we believe the document contains some valuable and useful guidelines and recommendations, we don't feel the document contains the necessary rigorous requirements that would justify it becoming an ISO standard.

    Most if not all of the requirements specified in FDIS 17024 are general in their specification and contain no definitions of what they mean and no definition of what compliance with them would mean. Also, because of this, the document does not define any mechanism for enforcing compliance or even discussing what compliance with it would mean, and, in fact, no mechanism for judging wether a certification body is or is not compliant with the requirements specified in the document.

    In our opinion, this is another of what seems to becoming a trend of ISO attempting to produce standards, that while they may contain useful information and guidelines, do not contain anything that meets the level of being a standard that organizations could comply with, and thus does a disservice to the community by attempting to make them standards.

    Comments provided by Mark Needleman

  22. Voted REVISE on Systematic Review ISO/TR 21449:2004, Content Delivery and Rights Management - Functional requirements for identifiers and descriptors for use in the music, film, video, sound recording and publishing industries - with the following comments:

    We believe this is an important document and should not be withdrawn under any circumstances. Our inclination is that the standard needs to be revised. Our major concerns have to do with 2 of the initial justifications for the justifications for the standard: assisting in the tracking of intellectual property, and in dealing with "multiple levels of aggregation and decomposition". Since 2004, both of these issues have become more complex at a staggering rate.

    We understand that the standard has to cover the general scope of 4 international treaties as its basis rather than any individual legislation in any country or territory. However, the tracking of digital versions of intellectual content may not be as well served as the current set of attributes defined under, for instance, "product", "release, "right", "tracking", and "use"; the current attributes seem relatively print-based in conception.

    Also, we fear that the attributes defined under "content" and "product" may soon (or already) be inadequate to deal with the continual segmentation of this kind of digital content in the current marketplace.

    Finally, although the largest need for the standard are on the commercial side, we believe that the library and museum community which is deliberately left out of consideration may deserve further consideration in a revision of this standard.

    Comments provided by Tomothy Dickey