Executive Update: 29 February 2012

Stuart A. Sutton, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director

1. Developments with the OCS/OJS

   Starting in 2007, DCMI began the process of stabilizing its publishing environment—first with the Open Journal System (OJS) followed in 2011 by the Open Conference System (OCS). Both open source publishing platforms are products of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP)—a partnership among the Simon Fraser University Library, the School of Education at Stanford University, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the California Digital Library. DCMI's goal with both platforms is to provide the DCMI metadata community with the means for publishing, preservation and long-term access to innovative resources in research and best practices stemming from DCMI meetings, conferences and deliberations. In the past month, there have been several significant announcements regarding new functionality and the long-term sustainability of the PKP.

   • California Digital Library Joins PKP Development

     As part of the California Digital Library (CDL) and eScholarship initiatives, the University of California joins PKP as a major development partner in open access scholarly publishing. As a result of this agreement, the CDL will assist with ongoing development and support of PKP's open source software suite including the OJS, OCS, and Open Harvester System (OHS), with Open Monograph Press (OMP) due for release this coming year. eScholarship is home to 45 peer-reveiwed journals and has now transitioned to OJS as its journal management and submission system and has integrated OJS with its pre/post-print, books and working papers repository containing more than 45,000 UC-affiliated publications. We anticipate that this strengthening of the PKP open source development efforts will serve DCMI well.

   • Enhanced Journals Made Easy (EJME): Publishing data sets

     SURFfoundation and PKP have announced a new set of plugins for the OJS to support enhanced publication in which the published text includes access to additional material such as models, research data, and metadata sets. The plugins support three different use cases. "The journal can host the data files on their own OJS installation (default functionality of OJS), link to files deposited into an external data repository, or let OJS deposit files into a repository on publication (after peer review). The journal can pick and match from these scenarios, according to best serve their target audience." The plugins also produce OAI-ORE resourcemaps for aggregation by other services. While the plugin has yet to be migrated to the OCS, we'll likely explore its capabilities with the OJS in the near future.

2. DCMI Liaisons

   Below, Tom comments on current and upcoming work on NISO/ISO standardization of DCMI terms. In the meetings of the Oversight Committee and the Advisory Board at DC-2011, we discussed increasing the visibility of the DCMI liaison relationships and developing more structured mechanisms to support liaisons in their work representing the interests of DCMI and its stakeholders in the activities of external organizations. We are in the process of developing some draft liaison guidelines that focus primarily on the inward/outward facing communications role of the liaison. When that draft is complete, it will be used as a strawman for Advisory Board discussions. In framing the draft, we are using as guides, the following four assumptions:

   1. Liaison's either have the necessary substantive expertise to represent DCMI's interest to the external organization or they have ready access to the necessary expertise within the DCMI community;

   2. The positions and interests represented by the DCMI liaison are the consensus of DCMI stakeholders;

   3. Liaison functions face both inward to interested stakeholders in the DCMI community in ascertaining consensus and outward to the external organization; and

   4. Consensus is shaped/determined by the liaison through ongoing consensus-building interactions and reporting within DCMI.

3. Ibero-American DCMI Community on Facebook
   

   As already posted as an announcement on the DCMI homepage, the Ibero-American DCMI community has created Cafeteria DCMI on Facebook for sharing and metadata discussions in Spanish and Portuguese. Thanks to Ana Alice Baptista for getting it set up and launched. Our DCMI community is a rich tapestry of metadata interests, cultures and languages groups and Cafeteria DCMI is a great indicator of our diversity.

4. NISO/DCMI Joint 2012 Webinar Series Schedule Complete

   The last two webinars for the 2012 NISO/DCMI webinar series have been scheduled and thinking about the 2013 series has begun. In addition to Karen Coyle's successful webinar last month, we have the following webinars yet to come (mark your calendars):

   1. Dan Brickley, Consultant on 25 April 2012 with Schema.org and Linked Data: Complementary Approaches to Publishing Data

   2. Jane Greenberg, Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on 22 August 2012 with Metadata for Managing Scientific Research Data.

   3. Brian Sletten, Bosatsu Consulting & Stéphane Corlosquet, Software Engineer and Drupal Developer at MIND Informatics on 24 October 2012 with Embedding Linked Data Invisibly into Web Pages: Strategies and Workflows for Publishing with RDFa

   On 9 February, I posted a message to the Advisory Board and Oversight Committee lists asking for suggestions regarding the NISO/DCMI 2013 webinar series. My thanks to the few who responded with excellent suggestions. We can use more suggestions as we put together the line-up. As I said in my list message, we are interested in names of both topics and possible presenters.

5. New DCMI Gold Partners
   

   The Research Center for Knowledge Communities (RCKC), University of Tsukuba and the Information School of the University of Washington have joined DCMI as Gold Partners. Both institutions represent centers of excellence in metadata research, teaching and learning. Both have made substantial contributions to the long-term sustainability of DCMI.

Thomas Baker, Chief Information Officer (Communications, Research and Development)

1. The "Dublin Core Metadata Element Set" as NISO and ISO standards

The ratification and recognition of the original, fifteen-element Dublin Core as an international standard began with its publication in 2001 by the US National Standards Institute and the National Information Standards Organization as the American standard ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2001, "The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set". This paved the way for the publication by the International Organization for Standardization, two years later, of ISO Standard 15836-2003. In 2007, a routine five-year review of Z39.85 led to the publication of the slightly revised and still-valid ANSI/NISO standard Z39.85-2007, in turn paving the way for the revised ISO standard 15836:2009.

The year 2012 marks the fifth anniversary of Z39.85-2007, once again triggering a five-year review. Over the coming months, DCMI will be asked by NISO to submit a revised text of the standard for review and comment by its member organizations. After responding to comments and making any necessary adjustments Z39.85 will, it is hoped, be re-published as a revised ANSI/NISO standard. When this has been completed, as in previous review cycles, attention will turn to a five-year review of the ISO standard.

2. Ongoing liaison with NISO and ISO and potential opportunities

Starting in 2001, and in parallel to these standardization efforts, DCMI as an organization has been registered as a liaison to various ISO committees:

1. To JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 (Joint Technical Committee 1, Sub-Committee 29, Working Group 11), "Coding of moving pictures and audio", known for its MPEG standard, DCMI is a Category C liaison organization.

2. DCMI is likewise a Category C liaison to JTC 1/SC 32/WG 2, "MetaData".

3. In February 2012, DCMI was granted Category A liaison status with ISO/TC 46/SC 4, "Information and documentation / Technical interoperability" -- a technical committee that covers metadata standards. Category A liaisons are organizations that make an "effective contribution to the work of the technical committee". They are are given access to documentation, invited to meetings, and may nominate experts to participate in working groups. At present, the other fourteen liaison organizations to TC 46 are: CE, CIDOC, EASE, EC, IAEA, IFSE, ISSN International Center, Infoterm, OECD, UNCTAD, UNECE, UNESCO, WIPO, and WMO.

As a Category A liaison organisation, DCMI will be able to follow a fast-track standardization procedure, whereby existing standards are introduced into the ISO process starting at the level of Draft International Standard, by-passing the lengthier steps required for New Work Items and Committee Drafts.

It has been suggested that DCMI avail itself of this opportunity to give other products of its work a higher profile in the international landscape of memory institutions by pursuing ANSI/NISO or ISO standardization of, say, the entire set of DCMI Metadata Terms or of the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile. Before undertaking such a course, DCMI Executive will encourage public discussion of the options in order to assess the benefits, but also the costs, of finalizing additional international standards.

Leif Andresen of the Danish Agency for Culture, DCMI's representative both to NISO and to ISO TC46/SC4, serves as the conduit for communication with these standards organizations regarding the five-year reviews and, potentially, for any additional standardization work that DCMI may wish to undertake and will keep the Dublin Core community informed about processes, deadlines, and other relevant developments.

Diane Hillmann, Vocabulary Maintenance Officer

Upcoming DCMI-UK Regional Meetings at the British Library

On 26-27 April 2012, the first meetings under the DCMI initiative to provide support for regional meetings of the DCMI community will take place at the British Library. DCMI support for regional meetings was discussed at some length in the Oversight Committee and Advisory Board meetings at DC-2011. While regionally conceived, developed and managed, the London meetings described below are endorsed by DCMI and JISC, DCMI's UK Member. DCMI endorsement of this regional meeting includes bringing up and managing the meeting website, handling online registration processes, providing permanent open access to meeting papers, presentations and other resources through the DCMI Open Conference System (OCS), and promoting the meetings through DCMI communication channels.

1. Five Years On—Seminar Assessing DCMI/RDA Accomplishments

   Progress continues in planning for the Five Years On RDA Seminar in London on 27 April. We are in the process of finalizing the speaker list for the seminar, still awaiting a few confirmations before announcing the list and opening registration. The invited speakers constitute a broad spectrum of leaders in the development of RDA and other standard vocabularies. All speakers will be expected to submit a paper as well as their presentation--the papers will be published by DCMi, and will serve to bring the issues addressed by the seminar to the broader community.

2. Vocabulary Management Community & DCMI/RDA Task Group Meeting

   Preceding the seminar but also at the British Library will be a day of initial meetings of two new DCMI groups: the DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group (formerly the DCMI/RDA Task Group, and responsible for developing the RDA Vocabularies), and the DCMI Vocabulary Management Community, working in the priority areas defined by the Vocabulary Management session at DC-2011. Both meetings will be open to all at no charge. However, because the room capacity will be limited, registration through the OCS will be required. Agendas for these meetings are currently being developed on the discussion lists of the DCMI Vocabulary Management Community and DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group.

As part of the DCMI initiative to support regional meetings, we hope that these meetings in London at the British Library under the endorsement of JISC and DCMI are the first in a long series of regionally meetings where the DCMI community gathers face-to-face. The London meetings offer the opportunity us to try out the suite of services DCMI provides as part of its endorsement of regional meetings.