Nettie Lagace
Associate Executive Director
National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
NISO has recently organized two working groups to address improvements in metadata creation, communication, and integration for scholarly resources: for e-books and audio and video materials. In neither case is there a single authority for metadata and the varied stakeholders (libraries, publishers, supporting vendors, preservation entities, etc.) encompass a wide range of requirements for their applications, to the eventual detriment of metadata consumers and end users. NISO invites stakeholders into a neutral forum to engage with each other and build consensus around solutions to mutual problems. The first working group, studying the e-book space, has analyzed the activity of multiple stakeholders in the e-book supply chain, which creates and manages metadata in a highly fragmented process. Its recommendations address pain points by illuminating the “crevices” that each stakeholder group generates, to aid partners to carry out their own functions and share metadata with each other effectively, correctly, and comprehensively. The second working group is seeking to improve collaboration and interoperability between organizations and systems in the area of video and audio media, which in recent years have been quickly integrated into learning spaces. Discovery and integration demand rich metadata for these materials, but current metadata recommendations do not encompass properties needed for effective compatibility between systems. This project is analyzing existing metadata standards and models against a wide variety of use cases to develop guidelines to improve sharing of bibliographic, administrative, technical and semantic metadata supporting diverse stakeholder objectives.
https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/ebmd
https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/video-audio-metadata-guidelines
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