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Technically Speaking

By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org

Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.

Column for February 2001

Looking for Mr. Goodstandard

Some giant companies have been able to control de facto standards in a few software markets; Adobe and Microsoft come to mind through their domination of PDF and Windows respectively. For the past year, each of these two software giants has been trying to gain control over the e-book market by establishing its own software as the de facto distribution standard.

It’s a high-stakes gamble on their parts, because if the competition for control of e-book distribution standards results in a less-than-total victory for one of them, the entire e-book market will suffer since a mass market in e-books will not develop until there are commonly accepted distribution standards.

In the meantime, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which believes that the success of e-books will depend on truly open standards, is doing everything it can to promote such standards.

Working with Andersen Consulting and experts from several large publishers, the AAP released a report recommending that the Digital Object Identifier standard be applied to books as a way of standardizing linking access to books, just as the DOI does for periodical articles. The report also recommended that ONIX be adopted as the XML DTD standard for e-book metadata. ONIX, which stands for ONline Information eXchange, is a set of about 200 metadata elements describing books and book-related data. It is a subset of the EDItEUR Product Information Communication Standards (EPICS) data set developed by EDItEUR, an international organization for book-related standards.

In short, ONIX is designed to be used by the book industry to transport e-book-related metadata. The actual content transmission of e-books is addressed by the Open Ebook Standard (OEB). Both ONIX and OEB have bibliographic components: Much of ONIX data is bibliographic, and OCLC has already mapped ONIX to MARC21. OEB endorses the Dublin Core metadata set.

The purpose of ONIX is only to standardize the transmission of product information. It does not cover the thorny problem of digital rights management (DRM). Competing versions of DRM software are already being marketed, and the AAP report noted that the industry will probably have to live with incompatible DRM standards for some time to come.

The path toward a commonly accepted set of standards, which is a prerequisite for an effective e-book system from the author to the reader, is proving a slow and difficult one. It’s a good thing the system of the printed book isn’t broken.

Contracts and Agreements

Innovative Interfaces—with the Black Gold Cooperative Library System headquartered in Ventura, California, for its Millennium system in six of the system’s seven member libraries.
SIRS Mandarin—with the Kansas State Library, for access to the SIRS Discover Deluxe general reference database by 1,800 public, school, and academic libraries in Kansas through Blue Skyways, a shared information service for the Kansas State Library community.
COMPanion Corporation—with the School District of Philadelphia, for the Alexandria library system for the district’s school libraries; and with the Houston Independent School District, for an Alexandria system for its school libraries.
Endeavor Information Systems—with the Lane Medical Library and the Jackson Business Library, two coordinate libraries at Stanford University, for the Voyager system.
TLC—with the National Library of the Philippines, for Library.Solution at the library’s main site and at 65 of its affiliated public libraries throughout the Philippines.

Announcements

Endeavor Information Systems’ Voyager customers can now receive free and full access to ScienceDirect Web editions, which include the full text of about 1,200 Elsevier electronic journals in the sciences, technology, and medicine. This is the culmination of Endeavor’s first joint project with Elsevier Science since the publisher bought the ILS vendor.
Computers by Design has enhanced its electronic content management software, CybraryN, to work with the DRA system to authenticate patrons in order to control which patrons can use which resources and how long each resource can be used. CybraryN also works with systems marketed by Epixtech, Innovative, SIRSI, TLC, and VTLS.

American Libraries