Submitted by: Nettie Lagace, Associate Director for Programs, National Information Standards Organization (NISO), USA
My primary responsibility is the management of a standards development process consisting of various working groups who create standards and recommended practices. I also work with the community in general to encourage broad adoption of this consensus work.
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 is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). On behalf of ANSI, NISO also represents US interests to ISO for Technical Committee 46 (TC 46) - Information and Documentation and all of its four subcommittees.
As such, NISO’s interests in content creation and distribution is wide-ranging and includes:
NISO’s perspective on annotation: In 2011 and 2012 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation generously awarded NISO a grant to organize two meetings to discuss the current state of annotation of digital books on a variety of platforms. These meetings were very successful in bringing together a variety of participants --both technical and non-technical-- to share different experiences and viewpoints and develop a better understanding of the annotation landscape with its many potential challenges and opportunities. One of the outcomes of the meetings was the formation of a NISO working group to develop, as a U.S. national standard, a structure for sharing annotations across reading systems. This working group met on a semi-regular basis during 2012, though it is now dormant.
NISO is still interested in supporting the community via the creation of an infrastructure for sharing annotations. We see this work as a high priority for many of our members, including scholarly publishers for whom these capabilities represent a huge advancement in scholarly communications. There are many potential use cases that could be contributed to advance the work and help assure its eventual adoption.
I look forward to this meeting and engaging with colleagues on these issues.