The National Information Standards Organization (NISO; ) is a

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

non-profit

standards organization A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpr ...

that develops, maintains and publishes technical standards related to publishing, bibliographic and

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

applications. It was founded in 1939 as the Z39 Committee, chaired from 1963-1977 by Jerrold Orne, incorporated as a not-for-profit education association in 1983, and assumed its current name in 1984.

Organization

NISO offers two membership categories, "voting members" and "library standards alliance". In January 2016, the "voting members" included 77 large corporations, mostly publishers, and large library organizations such as the

American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world. History 19th century ...

.Member companies
". National Information Standards Organization. Retrieved March 6, 2016. Voting members elect Directors and comment and vote on standards. The "Library Standards Alliance" included 135 members, primarily university and large public libraries. Library members receive free access to NISO webinars. Todd Carpenter was appointed Executive Director of NISO in 2006. In February 2019, NISO announced plans to merge with the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) in July 2019. In 2020, NISO launched th
NISO Plus conference
continuing the tradition of the NFAIS annual conference.

Work

NISO is accredited by the

American National Standards Institute The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...

(ANSI) and develops technical standards used in publishing, libraries, media, and other content distribution. NISO develops both formal U.S National Standards as well as recommended practices. It also hosts a variety of educational and training programs for the community. NISO is designated by ANSI to represent U.S. interests to the

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. M ...

's Technical Committee 46 (Information and Documentation), all of its subcommittees, as well as the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 34 - Document description and processing languages ( JTC 1/SC 34). In 2008, NISO was appointed Secretariat on behalf of ANSI for the TC 46 Subcommittee 9 ( TC 46/SC 9) - Identification and Description. NISO approved standards are published by ANSI. Unlike most other ANSI standards, all of NISO standards and best practices are freely available from its web site. Designations (names) of NISO standards all start with ANSI/NISO Z39 (read zee or zed thirty nine). In addition to formal standards, NISO also publishes recommended practices, technical reports and other consensus documents, and offers continuing education for librarians and information professionals. ''Information Standards Quarterly'' (''ISQ''), NISO's magazine, has been available online as

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

since 2011.

List of standards

Examples of NISO standards include: *ANSI/NISO Z39.2: Bibliographic records Information Interchange Format (IIF) encoding mostly used with

MARC standards MARC (machine-readable cataloging) is a standard set of digital formats for the machine-readable description of items catalogued by libraries, such as books, DVDs, and digital resources. Computerized library catalogs and library management ...

*ANSI/NISO Z39.29: Bibliographic References; last version is ANSI/NISO Z39.29-2005 (R2010) *ANSI/NISO Z39.5: journal title abbreviations, resulting in the 1969 publication of the American National Standard for the Abbreviation of Titles of Periodicals *ANSI/NISO Z39.7: Information Services and Use: Metrics & Statistics for Libraries and Information Providers Data Dictionary * ANSI/NISO Z39.21:

International Standard Book Number The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase or receive ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency. A different ISBN is assigned to e ...

* ANSI/NISO Z39.50: a protocol for accessing bibliographic databases *ANSI/NISO Z39.83: NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) for library catalogue data exchange *ANSI/NISO Z39.84:

Digital object identifier A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; th ...

(DOI) *ANSI/NISO Z39.85:

Dublin Core 140px, Logo of DCMI, maintenance agency for Dublin Core Terms The Dublin Core vocabulary, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT), is a general purpose metadata vocabulary for describing resources of any type. It was first developed ...

*ANSI/NISO Z39.86: Specifications for the Digital Talking Book: DAISY Digital Accessible Information SYstem * ANSI/NISO Z39.87: Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images - MIX *ANSI/NISO Z39.88:

OpenURL An OpenURL is similar to a web address, but instead of referring to a physical website, it refers to an article, book, patent, or other resource within a website. OpenURLs are similar to permalinks because they are permanently connected to a r ...

*ANSI/NISO Z39.93: Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol *ANSI/NISO Z39.96: JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite *ANSI/NISO Z39.99: ResourceSync Framework Specification *ANSI/NISO Z39.102: STS: Standards Tag Suite *ANSI/NISO Z39.105: Content Profile/Linked Document ( CP/LD)

References

External links

*
National Information Standards Organization (NISO) records
at the University of Maryland Libraries {{Authority control Standards organizations in the United States Library-related organizations Publishing organizations Organizations established in 1939 Non-profit organizations based in Maryland