NISO Keeps Its Eyes on Identifiers
By Pat Stevens, Interim Executive Director, National Information Standards Organization, Bethesda, MD, USA
Identifiers, long a mainstay of backroom business, are moving front and center as organizations including libraries and publishers work together across the globe to provide immediate access to digital information. Because information moves across the globe at the click of a mouse, identifiers and standards must work in this international context.
Over its history, NISO has promoted the development and effective use of identifiers. As a standards developer, our organization has managed globally deployed standards like Z39.84 or Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier. NISO has also been active as the American National Standards Institute representative to ISO TC46, the technical committee managing development of widely deployed and internationally used identifiers like ISBN and ISSN.
In March 2006, NISO held an Identifiers Roundtable to gather information on how our organization might improve usefulness of identifiers for digital information objects. Participants included people active in using identifiers in libraries, publishing, biomedicine and e-learning, and represented organizations in Canada, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the US. Discussion quickly identified two issues. First, the exchange of information across heterogeneous systems requires identifiers and supporting systems based on public standards. This allows a system to understand identifiers from other systems and prevents collisions between identifiers from different systems. Second, identifiers can function only in the context of a social and economic infrastructure — an infrastructure requiring funding from across the community using it. Hence the discussion made it clear that NISO must remain engaged with the issues of identifiers and identifier systems.
During the roundtable, participants further urged NISO to develop programs to educate audiences about identifiers and identifier systems and to continue our work with INFO Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The “info URI” helps ensure that identifiers libraries and publishers use today can be used most effectively in a Web environment. NISO will soon respond to roundtable participants’ recommendations and publish a report on the roundtable outcomes. 
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