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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 46 | August 2000
Australia leads review of library directory standard
The purpose of a directory is to identify and locate people, organisations or services and to describe their activities and services. Increasingly, this information needs to be stored in a form that can be queried by systems and that is maintainable by the party being described. Libraries are grappling with this issue as they transfer traditional services to the online environment. Recently there have been significant advances in the Australian library infrastructure through implementation of systems that support the ISO 10161 interlibrary loan protocol. This has highlighted the need for information about suppliers to be shared between systems and updated once only, preferably by the supplier.
Standards Australia Committee IT/19 deals with standardisation practices relating to libraries. IT/19 was aware of the need for a data standard to support the exchange of directory data between library systems. There is an existing standard, ISO 2146, but it was developed in pre-Internet days when the primary means of publishing directory information was as a printed document. Therefore when ISO 2146 came up for review last year, IT/19 seized the opportunity to raise a new work item to revise it. The revision is being led by the National Library of Australia.
In May this year, Judith Pearce attended a meeting of ISO Technical Committee 46 in Berlin to advance this task. It is anticipated that a committee draft of the revised standard will be ready for distribution by the end of the year.
For a full description of this project and its relationship to the PRIDE Project and to the Australian Interlibrary Resource Sharing (ILRS) Directory, see: www.nla.gov.au/wgroups/ISO2146.
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au