Site Navigation

Left Sidebar Items

Online Features

Follow American Libraries news stories, videos, and blog posts on Twitter.

NEW! Interview: Mohammad Abbas talks about his role as head of the new Library Department of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, the nations parliament in Baghdad.
Exclusive interview with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Interview with Judith Krug, 1995.
Interview: Andrew Pace Explains Why OCLC’s “Quick Start” Is a Sea Change . An April 24 conversation with American Libraries Editor in Chief Leonard Kniffel on OCLC's foray into web-scale management.
Read This Now: ALA’s Award-winners Represent the Best for Library Collections.The chairs of many of ALA's book and media award committees discuss their selections. Includes a complete review of RUSA's Outstanding Reference Sources.
Stimulate Your Library: How libraries can benefit from the 2009 stimulus bill.
Login is no longer required to view the current issue or archives online. First-time viewers need to install the ebrary reader. (Firefox 3 users: Note this workaround needed.)
AL Inside Scoop, American Libraries’ blog.
American Libraries: The First 100 Years, a timeline, 1907–2007
Top Ten Reasons to be a Librarian
10 Reasons Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library
12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country

ISO Backtracks on Royalties for Standards

By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorman@wesleyan.edu

Library-technology consultant based in Middletown, Connecticut.

Column for��November 2003

On September 20, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) council responded to a flurry of criticism by tentatively scuttling a proposal from ISO’s Commercial Policy Steering Group (CPSG) to charge royalty fees for the use of some of the world’s most basic information standards: country codes (ISO 3166-2), currency codes (ISO 4217), and language codes (ISO 639-2). All three codes are heavily used by libraries and library software vendors and are included in many other commercial software programs and operating systems. The Library of Congress is the maintenance agency for the language codes. The ISO Council sent the proposal back to the CPSG, asking that body to��“make a clearer case for what they want to do.”

It is a sign of the times that even the world’s umbrella standards organization was considering, however briefly, aggressively asserting its (alleged) intellectual property rights in order to control the use of the very information it is charged to develop and promote. ISO’s proposal was especially ironic because the promise of royalty-free use greatly helps to promote their standards. Earlier this year, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also backed off from a proposal to allow the adoption of technical standards that involved the use of proprietary software.

Both Tim Berners-Lee, director of the W3C, and Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium, wrote letters in opposition to the royalty fee proposal. In his letter, Berners-Lee stated that the W3C��“wishes to express its deep concerns over a recent proposal by the ISO Commercial Policies Steering Group (CPSG) to charge fees for the commercial use of ISO codes. . . . Any charges for the use of these standards are going to lead to fragmentation, delay in deployment, and in effect a lack of standardization. In particular, those users who depend upon multi-lingual or non-English language services will suffer.”

A Unicode resolution was even more adamant:��“The negative consequences of charging royalties would be severe, including strong incentives for companies and other organizations to:

avoid future contributions to ISO standards development;
avoid using or referencing ISO standards; and
develop and use alternative, royalty-free standards.”

National Information Standards Organization Executive Director Pat Harris plans to coordinate opposition among standards groups in the United States to any resurfacing of the ISO CPSG proposal.

Sensing an emerging firestorm of opposition, Jacques-Olivier Chabot, ISO director of general services and marketing, responded September 9 to the gathering storm by waffling:��“Sometimes there is a thin line between implementation and reproduction justifying the payment of a copyright fee. I know that the CPSG members who are sales and marketing professionals are always very cautious prior to deciding what to do.”��

On September 30, ISO issued the following statements concerning��“recently publicized misunderstandings of its current practice and intentions regarding its widely used country, currency, and language codes.

ISO is to continue with its established practice of allowing free-of-charge use of its country, currency, and language codes from, respectively, the ISO 3166, ISO 4217, and ISO 639 standards, in commercial and other applications.
There is no proposal currently being considered by ISO to impose charges for use of these codes, including on the World Wide Web and in software applications.”

A Classical Act

Sometimes inking a deal with an information provider is the easiest part for a library consortium attempting to provide its members with high-quality e-resources. Getting member-library staff to utilize the resource can be a much more formidable and time-consuming task. Classical International, the new library vendor of downloadable classical music, now offers web-based promotional resources to help consortia resell the company’s music service. Included are PDFs of brochures and postcards, logos, photos, communication texts, and a PowerPoint presentation. Find out more at��www.classical.com.

Nylink Secures the Past

Nylink, an OCLC-affiliated network headquartered in Albany, New York, concluded a license agreement with Blackwell Publishing for members wishing to access the company’s 629 journals. The agreement outlines the terms of access by which Nylink libraries can lease access. Among those terms are remote access and availability of all online back issues.

It’s the Cataloging, Stupid

It’s nice to see basic principles of cataloging that libraries have practiced (and championed) for decades being recognized and adopted by for-profit information services vendors. Here is a quote from a recent press release by Access Innovations that the Albuquerque, New Mexico, company wrote to pitch its more than 30 topical taxonomies to database providers:

“As access to large scale data collections has become part of everyday corporate and organizational life, the thesaurus or controlled vocabulary has moved from the domain of libraries (think Melvil Dewey or the Library of Congress) to become a cornerstone of content management solutions.”

For more information on Access Innovation, its NICEM AV database, Data Harmony software, or NewsIndexer content management products, see��www.accessinn.com.

Contracts and Agreements

Ex Libris sale of Aleph 500:

Beijing Normal University Zhuhai campus (Guangdong Province), a newly constructed campus.

VTLS sales of Virtua and Fastrac (RFID system):

Baltimore County Public Library, headquartered in Towson, Maryland, for the White Marsh Library, as a test project for the system, for Fastrac only.

Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine at Virginia Tech, for Virtua and Fastrac.

Sirsi migrations from DRA:

The Library Network, a consortium of 64 public libraries in suburban Detroit serving 2.8 million people, for 40 of its member libraries.

Library Integrated Network Consortium, headquartered in St. Charles, Illinois, and serving eight public libraries.

Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

EOSi sale of EOS.web:

Paul, Hastings, Janofsky and Walker, a worldwide legal firm with over 800 attorneys, to replace an Inmagic system.

Announcements

LexisNexis has begun to digitize the entire U.S. Congressional Serial Set from its beginning in 1789 to 1969. The set consists of Senate and House documents and reports, and is one of the basic primary sources for U.S. social, political, legal, biographical, and genealogical studies. Conversion is expected to be completed by the end of 2005.

Barnes and Noble ceased selling e-books in early September, citing insufficient sales.

Dynix is now marketing Content-Watch Internet–content management software. The company has also announced an agreement with OverDrive, a provider of e-books to libraries.��“OverDrive will provide seamless integration of its Digital Library Reserve solution with the cataloging and remote patron authentication functionality of the Horizon Information Management System and Dynix ILS.”

VTLS has created a separate division devoted to the RFID marketplace. Called Vtrax, the division will have sole responsibility for marketing Fastrac, the VTLS RFID product.

American Libraries