From: NISO <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:25:33 -0400

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces 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. “These libraries expect their entire
collection, including licensed and purchased electronic content, to be
made available within their discovery service of choice. But it is
often not clear which resources are available and which are indexed in
full text, by citations only, or both. Libraries deserve a clear
explanation of the degree of availability of the content they license
in their discovery service—and they need usage statistics to help
assess the effectiveness of their discovery tool.”

“Index-based discovery services involve a complex ecosystem of
interrelating issues and interests among content providers, libraries,
and discovery service creators,” states Jenny Walker, an independent
publishing consultant and Co-chair of the ODI Working Group. “The ODI
Working Group included participation and input from all three
stakeholders in the development of these recommendations. These
recommendations are intended to encourage participation by the content
providers in providing their content for indexing, transparency for
libraries with regard to the level of indexing for different
collections in the discovery services, and implementation of best
practice by the discovery services regarding unbiased linking to
source material, the neutrality of algorithms for generating result
sets, relevance rankings, and link order.”

“NISO and the ODI Working Group intend to support the Recommended
Practice with follow-up efforts,” states Todd Carpenter, NISO
Executive Director. “Areas of further investigation potentially
include collaborative discussion mechanisms, discovery of content via
application programming interfaces, handling of restricted content,
on-demand lookup, and interaction with COUNTER about usage statistics
related to discovery services.”

Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery (NISO
RP-19-2014) is available for free download from the ODI Working Group
webpage on the NISO website at:  www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/.

Cynthia Hodgson
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
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