Technical Services Special Interest Section

Serials Industry Systems Advisory Committee (SISAC) has achieved a number of major accomplishments in the past year. This report summarizes the activities and discussions took place at the ALA Midwinter meeting and the Annual meeting; and some interesting topics discussed in the SISAC NEWS, a newsletter of SISAC, and in the correspondences among SISAC members via Internet.

The final version of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Language in Requests for Proposal: Considerations and Specifications is currently available for distribution. This document is a result of requests to SISAC from librarians seeking EDI guidance as they search for integrated library systems which can meet the needs of today's technical services departments. The document covers many general considerations, such as how to express the needs of library community for EDI in terms of functions and transactions. It is important to distinguish between the general technical capability of a system to send and receive EDI transactions and the specific data elements necessary for an individual library to successfully transact business data with its trading partners. Technical specifications include ensuring that the integrated library system in question adheres to the latest ANSI Transaction Set standards and updates accordingly. As most of the major integrated library systems on the market today offer EDI capabilities, librarians who are involved in the specification writing aspect of shopping for a new library system or add EDI module to current system will find this document very helpful.

Besides this important document, SISAC has made a significant development on technical integrity of the ANSI X12 EDI standard (a standard used only within the United States) to the UN/EDIFACT transaction sets which adopts the international standard. The committee set up the Technical Advisory Group which includes technical experts from various parts of the serials profession to work towards the target that all EDI transaction will be carried out in the UN/EDIFACT standard, rather than the ANSI X12 standard. As Sandy Hurd, the Chair of SISAC, expected that SISAC will continue to actively work on the EDIFACT-based transactions after completing the transition from X12 to EDIFACT process (see SISAC News, v. 12, no. 1 (Summer/Fall 1997)).

In addition, SISAC has also completed work on the new version of the ANSI/NISO Z39.56 standard. SICI, which stands for the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier, is a very important SISAC standard and serves as the basis for the SISAC barcode. The SICI standard defines the requirements for providing an identifier for each item of a serial and each contribution contained in a serial in a coded form. This standard replaces the 1991 version of the SICI standard and includes numerous significant changes to the 1991 version. Without going into a lot of details the major changes include the following: 1) Introduced a method to indicate the medium used for distribution of serial items. The new standard allows users to tell whether the item or contribution being identified is in the format of paper, microform, or electronic, etc. 2) Established a means to specify a derivative part of a serial item or contribution. The standard provides the coding of tables of contents, indexes, or abstracts for either full serials or individual parts. This will be very helpful for legal publications. And 3) the revision of the standard establishes the SICI code as a sequence of defined segments: item, contribution, and control. The previous version of the standard did not explicitly address the segments, but rather implied their existence.

Digital Objective Identifier (DOI), a standard identification system for objects of digital commerce, was extensively discussed by the committee in both the Midwinter and Annual meetings. It will continue to be a very hot topic in the Serials profession in the coming years. DOI is initiated by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and is intended to make Internet commerce more secure for publishers. The DOI system allows a user to establish an immediate online interaction with the current copyright holder or assignee. DOI can be the identifier of a full journal issue, an article, a table, or a data set, which can be purchased separately via Internet. The committee will actively keep working with AAP on the development of this identifier system, though SISAC is not directly involved in the creation of this exciting technology.

Finally, SISAC announced the establishment of a new listserv, SISAC-L (listserv@sun.readmore.com). The purpose of SISAC-L is to conduct SISAC business, distribute SISAC announcements and publicity, and discuss initiatives underway by SISAC and its subcommittees.

Submitted by

Joan Liu
New York University Law Library
e-mail: liuj@turing.law.nyu.edu

Nonie Watt
Indiana University Law Library
e-mail: wattn@indiana.edu