24 January 2020
The NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) Standing Committee is inviting feedback on proposed revisions to its Recommended Practice, originally published in 2014 as NISO RP-19-2014 Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery. Librarians, publishers, vendors, and others who are interested in how content is included in discovery systems are encouraged to share their comments by 9 March 2020.
Index-based discovery services are now established as one of the main channels through which users discover and access content. NISO created ODI in 2012, and published the original ODI Recommended Practice in 2014, to provide technical recommendations for the exchange of data, including data formats, methods of delivery, usage reporting, frequency of updates, and rights of use. It is intended to provide a way of assessing content providers’ participation in discovery services and to ensure fair and unbiased indexing and linking.
Standing Committee co-chair, Rachel Kessler (Product Manager, ProQuest), said, “Members of the ODI Standing Committee — representing all stakeholder communities — have been working hard for the past few years to socialise and support the original NISO Recommended Practice, which has enjoyed wide implementation. More recently we conducted extensive community surveys to gather additional data about the current content discovery environment, which has helped us determine appropriate updates in our 'Phase 2' to benefit even more organisations.”
The second co-chair, Laura Morse (Director, Library Systems & Support, Harvard University), said, “In the process of updating the Recommended Practice, we have added material that affects content providers, discovery service providers, and libraries. At a high level, we hope the changes support better metadata sharing (including information about open access material) and record display, improved tracking of usage statistics and authentication mechanisms, as well as providing advice on systems, training, and communication for libraries that configure and upgrade their discovery systems. We also address some areas that were outside the scope of the original Recommended Practice, such as more detailed treatment of Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) content products. We warmly invite anyone who is concerned about the discoverability of licensed content in discovery systems to share their feedback on this second wave of ODI recommendations, which have been developed — with NISO’s help — by and for the community.”
The draft Recommended Practice is available for comment until 9 March 2020.