The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the UKSG are
pleased to announce that BioOne, JSTOR, LOCKSS, the Royal Society of
Chemistry and SpringerLink (hosted by Metapress) are the most recent
organizations to publicly endorse the Phase I recommendations of the KBART
(Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working Group, a joint NISO/UKSG
initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain.
KBART's Phase I Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2010), published in January
2010, contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate
metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.

All content providers, from major databases to small publishers, are
encouraged to publicly endorse the KBART Recommended Practice by submitting
a sample file to the KBART working group. Once the file's format and content
has been reviewed and approved, and the provider has made it publicly
available (in line with the recommendations), the provider will be added to
a public list of endorsing providers. Knowledge base developers can endorse
the KBART Recommended Practice by confirming that their systems can process
KBART formatted files. In addition, a contacts registry is available on the
KBART Information Hub at http://www.uksg.org/kbart or
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart where content providers and knowledge
base developers can register their organization's information for
downloading holdings metadata.

Sarah Price, KBART Co-chair and E-Resources & Serials Coordinator at the
University of Birmingham, comments: "It's really encouraging from both a
KBART and library perspective to see the uptake of the KBART recommendations
from content providers. It demonstrates the commitment to improving metadata
to aid discovery which in turn will benefit the whole community through
increased usage, ease of discovery and user satisfaction."
The KBART working group is now progressing towards the end of Phase II and
is focusing on enhancing the current recommendations with new guidelines for
eBook, consortia and Open Access metadata.

KBART Co-chair Andreas Biedenbach, Independent Publishing Professional,
concludes, "I am very pleased with the interest we have raised for our
working group. It is encouraging that we find more and more organizations
endorsing our recommendations and that we were able to add these renowned
companies to our endorsement list this month. We look forward to
collaborating with further parties involved in the e-resource metadata
management in the near future and to the upcoming tasks in connection with
our Phase II work."

For more information on endorsement, to review the KBART Recommended
Practice, or to find out how to get involved in future phases of KBART's
work, please visit http://www.uksg.org/kbart or
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart.

Cynthia Hodgson
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
chodgson@niso.org
301-654-2512

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