The RDA (Resource Description and Access) Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project is a year-long effort to improve the RDA Toolkit in several different ways. Restructuring includes generalizing existing instructions, and incorporating new elements from the IFLA Library Reference Model. Redesign includes greater flexibility in the display of instructions, improved user interaction with the Toolkit, and better tracking of revision history. The 3R project will extend into Summer of 2018 with an initial rollout of the new Toolkit on June 13, 2018, and an additional rollout in late August/early September.

The principal mission of JATS4R (JATS for Reuse) is to optimize the reusability of scholarly content tagged in JATS XML, by developing XML tagging best practices. JATS4R is an actively growing international and inclusive working group comprising publishers, archivists, persistent-identifier people, and other stakeholders.

The September NASIG newsletter reported on the best sessions held in Indianapolis, IN, USA in June 2017. Notably, Andrew Senior, coordinator for e-resources and serials at McGill University, presented Bringing It All Together: Mapping Continuing Resources Vocabularies for Linked Data Discovery. He spoke about the continuing resources vocabularies that are emerging as primary possibilities for linked data, and some of the challenges the serials community should be aware of regarding the extent to which these vocabularies work together in a linked data environment. He discussed BIBFRAME 2.0, PRESSoo, RDA, and Schema.org.

ICEDIS held a meeting just ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair on 9 October. The central focus was set on ONIX-PC, covering both its active and increasing use in the supply chain and several enhancements proposed.

ICEDIS members will then meet again at the Charleston Conference on 7 November. This session will update participants on ICEDIS news and also wider developments in a number of areas covered by EDItEUR, notably ONIX for Books, Thema and others. Graham Bell will also speak on behalf of EDItEUR: Are we done solving metadata problems?

The International Agency has registered a further increase in membership over recent months, with three new Registration Agencies being established by Casalini Libri, IDA (the Identification Agency, in Russia) and PCC (the Program for Cooperative Cataloging), whilst Brill Publishers has joined ISNI-IA as a regular Member.

Equally exciting has been continued interest in the possibilities of using ISNI to uniquely identify and disambiguate musical artists and performers and to offer similar facilities to actors, directors and producers in the film industry. As shown by the numerous active enquiries in these areas, the workflow challenges and requirements for unique, machine-usable and interoperable party identification are quite generic and are shared across domains far beyond those originally served by the ISNI standard.

IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) final document was revised after world-wide review, and it was endorsed by the IFLA Committee on Standards in August 2017. Moreover, Pat Riva’s paper presented at IFLA WLIC 2017 The IFLA Library Reference Model, a step toward the Semantic is available online.

The ISNI International Agency Ltd (ISNI-IA) announces changes to its infrastructure focused on providing open identifiers for organizations working in the field of scholarly communications. The ISNI Organizations Registry will enable organizations to change and correct their own records and allow the research community to identify author affiliations persistently and authoritatively, thereby supporting analysis of research output and impact.

OpenEdition Books is now using the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) author identification system.

This new functionality is part of High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure (HIRMEOS), a European project that aims to enrich and enhance five European open access publication platforms in the human and social sciences.

In scholarly publishing, one of the ways to measure a return on investment is to assess circulation and usage statistics. COUNTER is an industry-wide standard made for counting the use of electronic resources.  The second draft of Release 5 will be incorporating significant changes in response to the feedback received from both publishers and librarians through a survey.

Besides, a UKSG seminar was held on the same subject on 17 July 2017, and you may download the slides as well as these resources:

The Friendly Guide to Release 5 for Providers

Transition Timeline

E-book usage: counting the challenges and opportunities (Insights article)

Some publishers strive to improve their metadata with the goal of providing a better discovery experience. Mike Roberts describes Emerald Publishing’s extra step: publicizing its improved metadata using product-specific checklists and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative (ODI).