Promoting transparency in library discovery services: national Information Standards Organization publishes recommended practice; EBSCO announces full support

摘要

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of a new recommended practice, Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery (NISO RP-19-2014), which provides specific guidelines on participation in the new generation of library discovery services. The NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) began work in 2011 to develop recommendations that would increase transparency across all aspects of indexed discovery services. The group's final publication includes guidelines to content providers on disclosure of level of participation, the minimum set of metadata elements provided for indexing, linking practices and technical formats. Recommendations for discovery service providers address content listings, linking practices, file formats and methods of transfer to be supported and usage statistics. The document also provides background information on the evolution of discovery and delivery technology and a standard set of terminology and definitions for this technology area: An increasing number of libraries, especially those that serve academic or research institutions, have invested in the new generation of discovery services that use an aggregated central index to enable searching across a wide range of library related resources, explains Marshall Breeding, an independent library consultant and Co-chair of the ODI Working Group.