Of course you can, but you don't have to eat only fish what you have to do is follow the progress of the Protocol for Exchanging Serial Content working group! PESC is a NISO Working group approved in May, 2013, that will recommend a practice for the exchange of serial/periodical content. The nineteen member group, led by co-chairs from LC and NIH, had their first meeting in September 2013, and began by sharing packaging and submission guidelines and determining a number of subgroups to focus on various issues within the recommended practice. The PESC Working group will have been meeting for about 9 months by the time of the NASIG conference, and it will be a great opportunity to present the groups' progress to the attendees. Libraries, archives, indexing services, content aggregators, publishers, and content creators all need to exchange serial data and work with digital files of serials. These may be text based, image based, text with images, or some other combination. The file formats may be XML, EPUB, HTML, PDF, ONIX, etc. And the recipient of the files needs to be able to accommodate the various data and formats if they are to incorporate that serial content into their product or service. Having a recommended practice will improve the interactions between and among these constituents, resulting in a better end-result. Several other NISO and ISO committees and working groups are related in some way to PESC, including ISO/IEC CD 21320-1 (Information technology Document Container File) and NISO's Supplementary Materials for Journal Articles. The session will examine the overlap, discuss the plans to ensure that the recommendations aren't contradictory, and look at the next steps as PESC works towards their 18 month goal to deliver the recommendation. Questions and comments from the audience will be encouraged. Presenter: Laurie Kaplan Director of Editorial Operations, ProQuest

1. NISO – Protocol for Exchanging
Serial Content (PESC)
Laurie Kaplan
May 2, 2014
NASIG Annual Conference
Can you be a PESCaterian
among the Fort Worth Stockyards

2. Agenda
• NISO Operating Procedures
• Standard v. Recommended Practice
• PESC - Background and Problem Statement
• PESC Objectives and Statement of Work
• Timeline
• Partners and Participation
• Demographics of the PESC Roster
• Committee Members’ Experience
• Approaches Considered
• Outline of a Sample Package and Use Cases
• Progress to Date and Next steps

3. NISO Operating Procedures
How does a new committee
get started?
• NISO Topic Committees
identify areas of need
• Interested parties can suggest
a work item using the form on
the NISO website
• Another standards body may
request that NISO adopt an
existing standard as a NISO
standard
Suggestion Form

4. NISO Operating Procedures (cont.)
• Upon receipt of a proposed work item
– Topic Committees prepare initial work items
– Topic Committees propose the item to NISO
members if
• It is of sufficient value to warrant NISO’s investment
• It fits within NISO’s standards program (as defined by the
NISO Framework)
• The standard is feasible – technically, economically, and
politically
• No conflicts exist with other standards in or outside NISO
• A working draft can be completed within 18 months

5. NISO Operating Procedures (cont.)
• The proposed work item includes:
– a work item title
– background and problem statement (including a
description of any related standards or efforts)
– statement of work
– potential partners and participation
– a suggested timeline for development
– any funding requirements

6. NISO Operating Procedures (cont.)
• Proposals for new work items are approved by a
Topic Committee with a simple majority approval
vote.
• Upon Topic Committee approval, the proposal is then
submitted to NISO Voting Members
• Approval is by 10% of the Voting Members
expressing affirmative interest
• Comment periods are also included to make sure the
item is unique before the creation of a working group
to draft the standard or recommended practice
http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/document.php?document_id=3246&wg_abbrev=staff

7. Standard v. Recommended Practice
Standard
• A document that provides
rules or guidelines to achieve
order in a given context.
• Something considered by an
authority or by general
consent as a basis of
comparison; an approved
model
• National standard – a
standard adopted by a
national standardization body
and made available to the
public
Recommended Practice
• “Best practices" or
"guidelines" for methods,
materials, or practices in order
to give guidance to the user.
• These documents usually
represent a leading edge,
exceptional model, or a
proven industry practice.
• Use of any or all elements of a
Recommended Practice is
discretionary; it may be used
as stated or modified by the
user to meet specific needs.

8. PESC Background
• Proposed NISO Work Item
– Recommended Practice for Exchanging Serial (Periodical)
Content (Short Title: Protocol for Exchanging Serial Content)
• Work Item proposed by Erik Delfino and Leslie
Johnston, Library of Congress, and Jeff Beck and
Kimberly Tryka, NLM/NCBI/NIH
• Approved by the NISO Content and Collections
Management Topic Committee May 10, 2013
• Approval Ballot Period: May 12 – June 12, 2013
• First working group meeting: September 20, 2013

9. PESC Background (cont.)
• Serial publications represent a wide variety of
content – from magazines to scholarly journals
• Serial content can be text and/or image-based
• Serial content can be updated daily or every few
years
• Many organizations work with serial content from
various other organizations:
– libraries, indexing services, content aggregators,
archives, publishers and content creators

10. Background (cont.)
• Delivery methods for digital file packages can
vary widely
– Email with multiple attachments (.xml and .jpeg)
– Zip file with many loose files, with or without a
manifest or metadata
– Tar file representing an entire issue with a
directory structure defining relationships
– EPUB file with HTML, XML and image files
– Include a single article or issue, or a full journal

11. Background (cont.)
• Another NISO Recommended Practice –
“Recommended Practice for Online
Supplemental Journal Article Materials” notes:
– “The recommended best practice is to use a
standardized packaging format designed to
support disk-based or network-based storage and
transfer of digital content. The packaging is
particularly important for data transfers . . .”
(emphasis added)*
*Section A.3.6 – Metadata and Packaging (http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/rp-15-2013)

12. Problem Statement
While it is agreed that there needs to be
standardized packaging format for the transfer
of serial content, currently there is no
standardized packaging format that addresses
the level of specificity and granularity needed.

13. PESC Objectives
• To create a recommendation for a set of
guidelines – a protocol – that will define the
rules to be used to create a package of serial
content
• Protocol would be useful for interchange of
content and for automation of processes to
receive and manage serial content at scale
• Focus on what is being transmitted, how it is
organized and what processing is required

14. Statement of Work
The Working Group will pursue two related activities
concurrently, as decisions made and information
learned in each activity will inform the other:
• Determine specification
– define manifest
– clarify purpose of manifest
– define appropriate level of exchange
– prescribe type of directory structure
• Examine current practice
– potential to adopt an existing method rather than create one
from scratch

15. Timeline Plan

16. Timeline Actuals
Milestone Timeline
Appointment of working group September 2013
Approval of charge and initial
work plan October 2013
Completion of information
gathering
November 2013 to March
2014
Completion of initial draft of
recommended practice April to May 2014
Public test and comment
period June to December 2014
Responses and final
recommended practice February 2015

17. Partners and Participation
• Libraries or other repositories with a mandate
to preserve serial content
• Aggregators of serial content (such as Portico
or ProQuest)
• Indexers of serial content
• Publishers of serial content
• Content conversion vendors (such Data
Conversion Laboratory)

18. Demographics of the PESC Roster
7
8
1
Member Type
Library/Archive
Publisher/Provider
Other

19. Demographics of the PESC Roster
7
7
2
Interest Category
Supplier
General Interest
User

20. Committee Members’ Experience
• Some packaging formats used by or preferred
by several of the committee members’
organizations include:
– BagIt
– METS
– Metadata files in XML with PDFs for associated
full-text files
• Others indicated they take and work with any
format that they receive

21. BagIt
• BagIt is used by several organizations in the
digital library community
• Wikipedia describes BagIt as follows:
– BagIt is a hierarchical file packaging format designed
to support disk-based storage and network transfer of
arbitrary digital content. A "bag" consists of a
"payload" (the arbitrary content) and "tags", which
are metadata files intended to document the storage
and transfer of the bag. A required tag file contains a
manifest listing every file in the payload together with
its corresponding checksum.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BagIt

22. BagIt (cont.)
• BagIt works well for digital content normally kept as a
collection of files (+)
• It is also well-suited to the export, for archival
purposes, of content normally kept in database
structures that are unsupported by the recipient (+)
• BagIt focuses on the higher-level package (-)
• BagIt does not include requirements for the description
and organization of the content (-)
– Therefore the metadata needs for exchanging serial
content are not met
– Descriptive and structural content would have to be added
to relate content as the serial evolves

23. XLink
• The committee reviewed a possible XLink
solution
• Concerns were the XML requirement, complexity
of the concept, low adoption in the community
• XML Linking Language, or XLink, is an XML
markup language and W3C specification that
provides methods for creating internal and
external links within XML documents, and
associating metadata with those links.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlink

24. Approaches Considered
• Defining typical system activities related to
transferring serial content:
– Discover information (description & identification)
– Deliver content and information
– Rights management (including component parts)
– Content management
• Considered the package in terms of layers
– Who sent it, what is included, how does it relate

25. Approaches Considered (cont.)
• Areas to which standards can be applied:
– Manifest for the package
• Key item
• List contents of package for validation
• Be content-agnostic
• But still point the content to the next process
– Schema/tag set for the item metadata
– Schema/tag set for the article
– Schema/tag set for inclusion of rights information

26. Outline of a sample package
• Package Name
– Publisher or Title
– Volume or Volume Range
– Issue or Issue Range
– Package Type (.ext)
• Manifest Head
– Package name
– Distributor
– Copyright Holder
– Recipient
– Full Title Name
– Publisher or title abbrev.
– Count of package contents
• Manifest Contents
– File Inventory
– Directory Inventory
– File Sizes
• File & Directory Naming
– Unique, permanent article id
– Content type (article, fig, etc)
– Sequence (if applicable)
– File type or directory (ext.)
• Metadata
– Genre
– Collection/Series
– Volume
– Issue
– Add/Change/Delete
– Assembly Instructions
– Permissions

27. Various Use Cases
Purpose Sender Receiver
Newly released journal content Publisher Library/Customer
Issue’s worth of content (metadata & PDF) Publisher Archive/Library/Customer
Archiving journal content Publisher/Host Archive
Single article to an archive Publisher Archive
“Publish ahead of print” to host PrePress Vendor Online host (Vendor)
Full issue to host PrePress Vendor Online host (Vendor)
Full issue to indexer PrePress Vendor Indexer (Vendor)
Indexing metadata to bibliographic db Publisher/Host Bibliographic db (Vendor)
A year of metadata for a journal Publisher Library/customer
Indexing full text and metadata in search eng. Publisher/Host Search Engine (Vendor)
Journal issues to online bookstores Publisher Online bookstore (Vendor)
Transfer journal content (1 publisher to 2d) Publisher X Publisher Y

28. Progress to Date
Define focus of
the committee
Investigate
existing
package
options
Break into
committees for
in depth
analysis

29. Next Steps
• Group recently split into two different paths:
– Conformance – levels of packages and definition of
minimum compliance
– Use cases – further define the groups and interactions
• Will meet separately for about 6 weeks and then
review progress as a whole
• Create a draft recommendation
• Ultimate goal for those using the recommended
packaging is to reduce processing costs and speed
processing without manual intervention

30. Contact Information
• NISO – PESC:
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/pesc/
• Laurie Kaplan
– Director of Editorial Operations, ProQuest
– laurie.kaplan@proquest.com
Thank you!