Trip Report: NISO Plus Forum 2022

Trip Report: NISO Plus Forum 2022

Earlier this week, NISO held its one-day
NISO Plus Forum for 2022
.
This was an in-person meeting that is intended to feed into the online conference in February 2023.
Around 100 people from NISO’s membership groups—libraries, content providers, and service providers—attended to talk about
metadata
.
The meeting was structured in
World Café
style
and was moderated by
Jonathan Clark
.
The broad topic of «metadata» was broken down into three parts:
Identifiers: what identifiers are missing or underutilized
Exchange: what is the most significant barrier to seamless exchange?
Structure: what is impossible due to a lack of appropriate structures?
There were small table discussions for each part of no more than six people, with 15 minutes at a table before everyone got up and moved to a new table.
After three rounds of 15 minutes, a scribe that stayed at the same table the whole time reported the major themes to the larger group.
What makes this style interesting is that everyone’s experience is different.
We agreed to use the
Chatham House Rule
; what is reported here is my interpretation of my table’s discussion and my take on the broader outcomes.
Edited on 5-Oct-2022 to add:
NISO published a summary of the in-person meeting in the October issue of NISO I/O —
Are You Ready? Metadata — The Musical!
.
Identifiers
The most fascinating idea I discovered here was how much the metadata ecosystem relies on «Publication Date».
Not only do several parts use publication date as an anchor, but different understandings of the meaning of «publication date» cause many problems downstream.
There is the online publication date, the physical publication date, and sometimes simply an unlabeled publication date.
Some publishers have a practice of changing an online publication date to the physical issue date when the issue comes out.
(Changing a field that others use as part of metadata to distinguish one item from another is never a good thing.)
«Place of Publication» also has a lot of variability and inconsistency, even within a publisher.
Institution identifiers were also a topic, particularly with the lack of hierarchy in the
Research Organization Registry
(ROR).
Someone reported that ROR is working to address the problem, but right now there is not a good way to relate a department to its encompassing agency or organization.
I showed my professional age a bit by mentioning
SICI
—the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier.
This is a compound identifier developed in the 1990s. Given a citation, you could construct a SICI that was a kind of key to the article. For instance,
Lynch, Clifford A. «The Integrity of Digital Information; Mechanics and Definitional Issues.» JASIS 45:10 (Dec. 1994) p. 737-44
…could be condensed into…
0002-8231(199412)45:102.3.TX;2-M
This standard didn’t last past the early 2000s, although a few people at my table mentioned that they saw examples of this identifier in their backfile as the …