Libraries and Standards, by Karen Coyle http://www.kcoyle.net/jal-31-4.

html

Li br ar ies an d S ta nd ar d s
By Karen Coyle

Preprint. Published in The Journal of Academic

Librarianship, Volume 31, Number 4, pages 373-376

Introduction
Libraries are in a unique position to take advantage of
standards as compared to many other institutions. Unlike
banks, or manufacturers, or retail businesses, libraries are
not in competition with each other. And unlike elementary
schools, or city governments, or non-profits in general,
libraries have a strong professional connection that
promulgates standards.

Libraries also have the motivation for standards. Like

old-age pensioners, libraries exist on fixed incomes that
notoriously do not keep up with inflation. Standards create
efficiencies both for libraries and for the vendors who serve
them. They make it possible for all libraries to be
customers for the same library system design. They also
make it possible for libraries to share data. When I want to
impress non-librarians with the incredible efficiencies in
libraries, I tell them about the MARC21 record, which is
created once (often by the Library of Congress) for each
book published in this country, is stored centrally by
library service providers, then is downloaded to the
database of every library that purchases that book. This an
impressive savings of time across the libraries in the U.S.

Standards not only create efficiencies in terms of time and

costs, they also provide a uniformity of product that is
important to customers. Many standards in the
manufacturing area assure customers that indeed a new
light bulb will fit into the old lamp, and that, at least within
a single country, all electrical items purchased will have
plugs that match the wall sockets of the buildings. These
are issues of interoperability between parts of the same
system. In libraries, standards are also about
interoperability, not only for the exchange of data but also
the ease with which library users can move from one
library to another without having to learn entirely new
skills in bibliographic research.

The Landscape - Who's Who In

Library Standards
The original library standards were set by the fledgling
American Library Association in the late 19th century. ALA
created standards relating to cataloging and the creation of

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catalogs. Today ALA is still involved in the development of

cataloging rules, but the development of library standards
has been taken up by the National Information Standards
Organization (NISO). NISO is a formal standards
development organization that is accredited by the
American National Standards Institute (ANSI). NISO is
responsible for all standards in the Z39 range. These
represent standards for libraries, information systems, and
publishers. In addition, NISO is designated by ANSI as the
U.S. representative to the International Standards
Organization (ISO)Technical Committee 46 on Information
and Documentation. NISO is a membership organization
and its activities are funded for the most part by member
dues. The membership, primarily professional
organizations in the library field and vendors who serve
libraries, both reflects and directs NISO's mission. As a
formal standards organization and a member of the ANSI
family of standards organizations, NISO operates under
certain "rules of engagement," such as the consensus
process of standards development, and the periodic review
and re-certification of standards in its care.

NISO now "owns" the original MARC record standard,

originally ANSI Z39.2 and now ANSI/NISO Z39.2, and was
the conduit to getting that standard certified at the
international level through ISO as ISO 2709. The
organization has about two dozen active standards ranging
from the management of libraries (ANSI/NISO Z39.73 -
Single-Tier Steel Bracket Library Shelving; ANSI/NISO
Z39.7 - Information Services and Use: Metrics & statistics
for libraries and information providers), to publishing
(ANSI/NISO Z39.9 - International Standard Serial
Numbering (ISSN) , Z39.18 - Scientific and Technical
Reports - Preparation, Presentation and Preservation), to
information retrieval (Z39.50 - Information Retrieval :
Application Service Definition & Protocol Specification,
OpenURL). Yet the technology standard that is the most
used by libraries, the MARC21 standard for library
cataloging, is not a NISO standard. This standard is instead
managed by the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress was the force behind the development

of the ANSI standard that defined the structure for the
Machine Readable Cataloging record (MARC) in the
1960's, which was needed to create computer-driven print-
on-demand service for the Library of Congress card
program. Using that structure, the Library of Congress
developed the fields and subfields that would be used to
encode the content of a library catalog record. While the
record structure of the MARC record has not changed, and
is still defined by ANSI/NISO Z39.2, the content of the
record has been under constant evolution under Library of
Congress's care.

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In addition to the MARC21 standard, Library of Congress is

the maintenance agency for some other standards. As
maintenance agency, the Library is the central information
point for the standards and any documentation related to
the standards. The degree of formality of these standards
and the amount of maintenance varies, however. The
Library of Congress is the maintenance agency for Z39.50,
one of the best known of the NISO standards, and for the
web-based version of Z39.50, SRU/SRW. It is also the
maintenance agency for METS, an independently created
standard that is used by digital libraries to structure
resources for storage, and for a number of standards
created by the Library of Congress itself, such as the XML
transformation of the MARC21 record, and MODS, a
bibliographic description record based loosely on MARC21.
Although these ad hoc standards gain authority through
their association with the Library of Congress, they
generally serve a smaller community than the standards
that have been treated to the formal process that NISO
provides. Another notable library organization that has
engaged in the development of standards is OCLC, and its
sponsorship of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(DCMI). Dublin Core is especially interesting in that it was
expressly developed as a non-library standard. Although
Dublin Core could be used by libraries, the organizers of
the effort wanted to create a standard would be a light-
weight resource description language that could be used by
organizations that do not have the history or experience of
libraries. DC is not associated with any particular set of
cataloging rules so that any community that has a need to
describe documents can make use of it. In fact, Dublin Core
is used widely today both within and outside of the library
community.

Some standards do not have an actual standards

organization behind them, but are curated by a group or
committee of interested parties. The METS standard,
mentioned above, is such a standard with its own
governing board, as is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) , a
standard for the markup of books and other texts. This type
of standard is viable as long as the community is relatively
small and cohesive; expansion of the technology's influence
usually requires more structure and more coordination
than a small group can provide.

Another committee effort, but one with wide adoption, is

that of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules. Although not
strictly a technology standard, AACR has a profound effect
on the technology of libraries. The Joint Steering
Committee for Revision of the Anglo-American
Cataloguing Rules has six member organizations
representing the Anglo-American library world.

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Non-Library Standards In Libraries

The highly networked world in which we live has increased
the flow of information in all aspects of our lives. Libraries
have taken advantage of these new communication
technologies since their very inception: some of the very
first computerized library catalogs were also the first open
access databases on the Internet in the early 1980's.
Today's libraries are fully integrated with the Internet and
its technologies, providing services and delivering
documents to users over the network. In terms of
standards, this has meant that the library has become an
active user of the standards underlying the Internet, and of
the application standards that make it possible to deliver
library services over the Net. The user interface of library
catalogs today is written in HTML, the language of Web
interfaces, and these travel over the Net using the
Hyper-Text Transport Protocol (HTTP), both managed by
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The basic
Internet protocols that allow all this to work are the
standards of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The MARC standard now allows the creation of MARC21
records using the Unicode character set, an ISO standard
(ISO/IEC 10646), in place of the ANSEL character set that
had been the library standard for many decades. And
digital library applications are increasingly being written
using the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) , also
managed by W3C. Some future applications, especially in
academic libraries, will make use of the Shibboleth
standard to authenticate library users, and perhaps
XACML, an XML language that defines authentication
criteria. Shibboleth is being developed by the Internet 2
project, and XACML has been developed by OASIS, an
organization that fosters standards in XML. These are just
a few examples of standards that libraries are using.

Once libraries had their own separate technology, based on

standards that were not shared with other communities.
Now libraries are often developing their applications from
technology that originated in the broader information
community. There are a number of positive aspects to this,
not the least that library technologies developed on
non-library standards will have the capability to interact
with products in the broader information technology
world. When Google introduced "Google Scholar" services
early in 2005, within days librarians were announcing
experimental links that they had developed between the
Google service and their library catalogs. These links used
the OpenURL, a library standard that makes use of HTTP
to connect metadata to services. The OpenURL service has
now been added to Google Scholar for some academic
institutions. This is a good example of interoperability
between libraries and non-library information services,

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and how these are made possible through standards.

Libraries and Information

Standards
In the previous column I talked about changes in the
standards landscape, from a traditional process that put
long-lived standards in place to a modern, fast-paced
process that allows standards to be part of rapid-
development. This new standards environment affects
libraries as it does any other institution, but there is
another aspect of today's standards development that is
having even more of an effect on libraries and library
technology, and that is the near ubiquity of information
standards in all environments. There are information
standards that affect individual industries and most
industry standards groups list information standards as
part of their charge. But information is itself an industry
today, encompassing computing and networks, online and
offline publishing, scientific data, and web services, among
others.

The intense philosophical questions on the role of libraries

in this new information age, often couched in terms like
"the library vs. Google," are played out in the standards
arena as well. There, the question is whether library
standards are - or should be - information standards, and
what role the library profession should play in the
development of standards in the general area of
information technology. Regardless of what one thinks
should be the case, the fact is that standards developed in
the library community are rarely adopted by others, even
when the standard is highly flexible and could serve a
variety of purposes. As an example, the data structure of
the MARC record that was developed in the mid-1960's
was very advanced for its day, allowing the creation of
variable-length fields in a time when most computer
systems were limited to fields with short fixed lengths.
Surely this could have been of use to others who were
working with variable length data, but such use did not
arise. Z39.50 can serve as another example: the basic
protocol allows the retrieval of records from a database, not
just a bibliographic database. Although adopted by some
members of the geospatial community for database
searching, the great majority of users of Z39.50 are
libraries and library systems. There is no analysis of these
standards that would answer the question of why they
didn't gain greater acceptance. One possible answer is that
although these standards appear to be generalizable, in fact
the need that they fulfill for libraries is not one that is felt
in other communities. Another answer could be that
libraries did not to reach out beyond their own community

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with these technologies and therefore they did not come to

the attention of others who could have used them.

The example above of Google Scholar and its use of the

OpenURL shows that library standards that are based on
standards of the broader information community, as
OpenURL is based on HTTP, can be used to create
interoperability between libraries and non-library services.
Google is positioning itself to bridge the gap between the
web and libraries with its Scholar and Print services, but
the OpenURL was developed as a NISO standard with
library and library vendor representatives. If the OpenURL
standard were being developed today, it is possible that
Google would have been a member of that standards
committee.

There are standards that are not library standards but in

which libraries have had a formidable role. Dublin Core, a
general metadata standard, developed out of the research
division of OCLC. Those working on Dublin Core made an
effort to create a community that was not limited to
libraries, and in fact Dublin Core has become the standard
for descriptive metadata in the web community. Libraries
also had a role in the creation of the Unicode character set
because they were able to provide language expertise to the
Unicode committee. These two experiences tell us that
libraries are able to influence standards outside of their
own community, but to do so they must join broader
standards efforts. Unfortunately, those broader standards
efforts are expensive, both in terms of the time that expert
staff must spend on the standards, and on the costs to join
the standards effort and attend meetings.

Problems and Issues

There are many things that are right with the world of
library standards: libraries have a long history of
standardization of their operations, the result of which has
been great efficiencies in the management of libraries;
libraries have begun to make more use of mainstream
standards and therefore are gaining interoperability with
larger world of information services; and libraries have
broken through their own boundaries and have contributed
to standards used by others in the information arena.

But there are also some areas of the library standards

environment that are problematic. As noted above,
although NISO is the primary organization developing and
maintaining library standards, there are mature standards
in the library environment that are not included in NISO's
standards purview. This creates a need for coordination
among standards developers which currently is not taking
place. A notable lack in the library standards world is the

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role of professional leadership that would logically be

coordinated by our primary professional organization,
American Library Association (ALA) . ALA, however, has
divested itself of its standards role over the last decades.
NISO could conceivably play this coordination role, but
although many professional organizations are members of
NISO, NISO's role is broader than just libraries, as the
"Information Standards" portion of its name implies. In
essence, we are a profession without a professional
standards focus.

The fact of having multiple standards organizations

requires that specific roles in the standards sphere be
clarified, something that has not occurred in the library
standards world. Many standards efforts will naturally
begin as isolated development projects, and some will stay
small and ad hoc for their entire lifetimes. But where a
standard could benefit a larger segment of the community
there needs to be a way to channel the efforts into a
standards assembly line. What happens today, however, is
that developers of applications are faced with a set of
unattractive choices: the most formal standards body, and
the one that has the support of the largest community, is
NISO. However, the NISO standards process is known to
be slow and tedious, not in keeping with the fast pace of
information technology today. NISO does, however,
provide a process and structure for standards development
which are funded by the NISO members. Developers who
choose to remain independent have to set up a governing
body and have to fund the activities themselves. The risk is
that activities like maintenance of the standard will be
slighted. But the greatest risk is that the application will
not reach a wide enough audience to become integrated
into general library systems, and therefore most libraries
will not be able to make use of the technology. NISO has
initiated a light-weight standards registration process that
allows the NISO community to put its seal of approval on
ad hoc standards that have not gone through the full,
formal process that NISO standards require. It remains to
be seen if this process helps those standards find greater
distribution in the library community.

Conclusion
At the end of the previous article I asked the question: Does
it even make sense to talk about a "library" standard?
There are some standards that we can call library
standards, such as the NISO standard for library statistics
(Z39.7) or the standard for library shelving (Z39.73). The
goal of technology standards, however, is primarily the
exchange of information, and what we think of as library
standards are often technologies in which the library is one
of the parties in that exchange. Libraries are broadening

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their potential partnerships by making use of mainstream

technology in their standards, such as XML and the
technologies of the World Wide Web. These interchange
standards still need to serve the library's mission and goals,
however, and a vital role of our standards efforts is to
define technology that supports the values of this unique
institution.

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