2 November 2018
The National Information Standards Organization is seeking comments on a new draft Recommended Practice, KBART Automation: Automated Retrieval of Customer Electronic Holdings. KBART Automation is an enhancement to KBART, Knowledge Bases and Related Tools, the NISO initiative which provides a format for content providers to use to transfer journal and book metadata to link resolver knowledge bases and other library software. This new draft recommended practice provides instructions to support automated feeds customised to include the holdings available at a particular institution, making it easier for libraries to know their knowledge bases are up to date with their current subscriptions.
"The purpose of the KBART Automation initiative is to facilitate the retrieval of KBART Holdings Reports, which are customised files representing an institution’s holdings at a given time, typically maintained by the content provider in any case," said Oliver Pesch, Chief Product Strategist at EBSCO Information Services and co-chair of the KBART Automation Working Group. “Besides providing focus on specific KBART fields to be transmitted automatically, the draft Recommended Practice describes elements of an Application Programming Interface (API) the content provider would support to enable interaction with the knowledge base provider."
“KBART Automation will benefit many parties, certainly including libraries, by reducing their workload to keep their data updated. We also expect it will help content providers, who will see that more timely and accurate activation of their content will result in increased usage,” said Stephanie Doellinger, Knowledge base Data Ingest Section Manager at OCLC, the other co-chair of the KBART Automation Working Group. “Working group members are looking forward to receiving comments from the NISO community on this draft document, which will enable us to be sure it will be complete for publication early next year, as well as provide us with further input for future phases of this work.”
The NISO KBART Automation: Automated Retrieval of Customer Electronic Holdings Recommended Practice is available for public comment from 2 November to 3 December 2018. All input is welcome.