Despite the various lockdowns, work has been ongoing; virtual activities are planned throughout the year, notably virtual Standing Committee meetings will be organised during this summer. This issue notably reports about Dewey updates (p. 6), the new French National Library website (p. 10), the new Director General of the German National Library and various projects (p. 11), projects and developments on name authority control and identity management led by the Cooperative Committee for Chinese Name Authority (CCCNA) (p. 9). Advances on RDA are also reported p 29.

The MARC Advisory Committee (MAC) advises the MARC Steering Group concerning changes to the MARC 21 formats. The MAC Annual Meeting was held online from 30 June-2 July 2020. The recordings are now available. Three discussions are specifically related to continuing resources:

• Changes to fields 008/21 and 006/04 for type of continuing resource in the MARC 21 bibliographic Format (Discussion Paper No. 2020-DP10),
• Defining subfield $0 (Authority record control number or standard number) in field 022 in order to provide a place in the ISSN field for the ISSN URI (Discussion Paper No. 2020-DP11),
• The modernization of field 856 in the MARC 21 formats (Proposal No. 2020-03).

IFLA received a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the WikiCite project.

The objective of the WikiCite project is to improve citations in Wikimedia projects through the development of open bibliographic data on Wikidata. Wikidata itself is a multilingual, open source repository of structured data and is playing an increasingly large role in supporting Linked Open Data initiatives in libraries.

IFLA’s Committee on Standards and Linked Data Technical Subcommittee (LIDATEC) are pleased to announce the launch of IFLA Namespaces.

This website allows for linked data access to various IFLA Standards, including:

• The FRBR Vocabularies
• The ISBD Vocabularies
• The UNIMARC Vocabularies
• MulDiCat

The next standard to be included will be the LRM (Library Reference Model).

DataCite announces the launch of the new persistent identifier (PID) services registry available at https://pidservices.org, a new service to find services built upon different PIDs from core technology providers and those who integrate from across a variety of disciplinary areas. This is a combined effort across multiple organizations as part of the EC-funded FREYA project grant with the aim of furthering discoverability of PIDs and the services that are built upon them.

The NISO Working Group on E-Book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain invites comments on its proposed Recommended Practice. Everyone involved in producing and using e-book metadata — publishers, retailers, libraries, service providers, and preservation agencies — is encouraged to share their feedback by August 2nd, 2020. In this recommended practice, item 5.1.4 develops a recommendation for monographs in book series and the use of the ISSN.

The RDA Steering Committee (RSC) is pleased to announce that Damian Iseminger will succeed Gordon Dunsire as the Technical Team Liaison to the RSC and chair of the RSC’s Technical Working Group; his two-year term starts January 2021.

Damian Iseminger is currently a member of the Working Group and now takes on the additional role of Technical Team Liaison-Elect. At the beginning of 2021, Gordon Dunsire will step down as chair but will continue as a member of the Working Group.

Authors lose time and effort when their manuscript is rejected by a journal and they have to repeat the submission process in subsequent journals. MECA is a NISO project which is developing a common means to easily transfer manuscripts between and among manuscript systems, such as those in use at publishers and preprint servers.

The MECA Recommended Practice Public Comment period has ended. You may access the draft document and view comments received, which will be considered by the Working Group prior to final publication.

The first ever NISO Plus conference was held in Baltimore, USA, on 23 to 25 February 2020. It was centered on scholarly communication related to standards which is of special interest to SciELO and ORCID. NISO Plus succeeded in avoiding the “sage on stage” traditional conference format, and was all about open, lively (and nerdy!) discussions. This post recaps the discussion around contemporaneous standards.

When UKSG was cancelled, ICEDIS decided to make a virtue out of a necessity, arranging a conference call round-up instead. Sixteen colleagues from a range of organizations interested in serials took part in this virtual meeting. Tim Devenport, making a brief recap about ONIX-PC and other serials standards maintained by EDItEUR, announced the decision to place ONIX-PC in ‘maintenance mode’ unless or until new requirements or novel use cases emerge. EDItEUR’s Graham Bell said more about the organisation’s work outside of serials, focusing particularly on recent progress with ONIX 3.0, Thema and EDItX.

There then followed 2 presentations on topics related to the core mission of ICEDIS:

• Nathalie Cornic (ISSN International Centre) updated the group on progress since ISSN-IC took over the stewardship of the Keepers Registry – a vital resource covering e-journal preservation that records which agencies have preserved what;
• Todd Carpenter of NISO briefed the meeting on a series of NISO, ISO and other initiatives either underway or at the planning stage.

Copies of the meeting Minutes are available from the EDItEUR website (slides used by each presenter are linked from within the minutes).