The intent behind the formulation of Thema was to develop a descriptive book subject classification system (similar to BISAC) that was suited to the needs of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual book supply chain. A core tenet of the system was that the scheme would be sufficiently flexible to allow an individual market to retain a unique cultural voice, all while remaining a unified and simple-to-adopt scheme.

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a NISO member organization, recently published an informative three-part series on the creation and development of Thema.

The ISNI International Agency and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) have announced that BAnQ is joining the ISNI network as a Registration Agency operating in Québec. ISNI, the International Standard Name Identifier, is used to uniquely identify persons and organizations across a wide range of creative sectors. The ISNI International Agency acts as the registration authority for identifiers. BAnQ plans to offer ISNI assignment services to people and organizations associated with Québec works, including visual and audiovisual materials as well as books.

At IFLA WLIC 2019, the ISBD Review Group gave account on the work carried out to prepare the revision of ISBD, as mentionned in the four-years work plan for revision of ISBD 2018-2022 approved by the IFLA Committee on Standards.

The 2nd international ISNI Summit for Libraries was held on 26th-27th June 2019 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Organized by the BnF and the British Library, the summit attracted 36 participants, including representatives from 17 national and research libraries as well as representatives from the ISNI International Agency and OCLC.  This summit led to the creation of the ISNI Consultation Group for Libraries led by a steering group in charge of drafting the terms of reference and an action plan. The resulting final statement about the ISNI Consultation Group for Libraries is available on the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s website, together with presentations delivered over the two days: https://bit.ly/2jZ6LpO

In the next months of 2019, ISNIs and basic supporting metadata will be available in several Linked Data (LD) ‘flavours’ – right now, the work is focusing on RDF/XML and JSON-LD. It will be possible to access the ISNI linked data under an open licence via two mechanisms –via API or utilizing LD data dumps. Members of the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have collaborated to specify ISNI-IA’s requirements and the ideal data model, while developers from the Leiden, Netherlands office of ISNI’s IT/systems provider OCLC are carrying out the necessary software analysis and programming.

Please contact ISNI LD coordinator Corine Deliot or Tim Devenport if you would like to know more.

The stage is set. Items are ready to be described by metadata, or have some metadata to be augmented or used. But who are the cast of players that interact with metadata to ensure its usefulness? The project Incentives for Improving Metadata Quality, led by Fiona Counsell, has been focused on highlighting the applications and value of metadata for all parts of the community. In order to tell these stories, the project team considered the four key metadata players and how to best describe them.

The French Committee for Open Science (CoSO) was formed as a result of the National Plan for Open Science presented by Frederique Vidal, the Higher Education, Research and Innovation Minister on July 4^th 2018, to the annual conference of the League of European Research Libraries (LIBER). The Committee wrote recommendations for the benefit of researchers and institutions, to foster open identifiers for open science. A large number of identifiers coexist. Good practice guides and action plans are being developed at the international level. The CoSO is defining a strategy to develop and adopt these identifiers with an objective of openness.

From 21 to 24 June 2019, NISO will participate in 4 sessions at ALA 2019, the American Library Association Annual Conference. Notably, the NISO Annual Members Meeting & Standards Update to be held on 22 June 2019 will provide updates on projects newly underway or recently completed: Open Discovery Initiative, Transfer, KBART Automation, RA21 and Content Platform Migrations.

Laurie Kaplan, Sr. Manager at ProQuest, and Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center and Head of the ISSN Section at the Library of Congress, are active on both the PIE-J committee and the ISO 8 revision working group. Through this presentation, they highlight the most salient points of the newly re-born standard ISO 8:2019:  Presentation and Identification of Periodicals. The “crossing” of the ISO 8 Standard and the NISO PIE-J RP enhances the guidance of PIE-J by presenting similar information in a standard, for the benefit of all stakeholders of the periodical supply chain. There is a strong emphasis on the importance of the ISSN as an identifier of periodicals, with reference to ISO-3297, Information and documentation — International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), currently under revision. It also makes specific recommendations for presentation and identification aspects of retrospective digitization of periodicals.

On 10 June 2019, NISO organised an Open Teleconference about the Transfer Code of Practice, updated in April 2019. Transfer originated with the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) and moved to the auspices of NISO in 2014. Since September 10th, 2018, the Transfer alerting service has been hosted by the ISSN International Centre: https://journaltransfer.issn.org

The  conversation was held with Transfer Standing Committee co-chair James Phillpotts of Oxford University Press and Standing Committee member Linda Wobbe of SCELC. The recording of this event can be downloaded.