Technical Services Special Interest Section

As a strong voice for standardizing formats for the electronic transmission of serials information in the United States, Serials Industry Systems Advisory Committee (SISAC) continues its efforts to bridge the electronic communication of serials among all serials specialists, from publishers to librarians, and from subscription agents to integrated system vendors. This report abstracts the achievements and activities of SISAC in the past year, discussions that took place at the ALA Midwinter and the Annual Meeting, and some interesting topics that were addressed in the Book and Serial Industry Communications (BASIC), SISAC NEWS, and in the correspondences among SISAC members via Internet.

In the fall of 1998, under the endorsement of both Book and Industry Study Group (BISG) and SISAC, BASIC, a new sub-entity of BISG, was formed. The purpose of this partial merge is to avoid the overlap in some of the standards worked by both groups. BASIC will focus on common electronic standards development previously worked by both BISG and SISAC, which consist of those emphasizing on digital transfer in all types of contents, such as EDI/EDIFACT message development. However, the unique SISAC activities remain under the SISAC name which include SISAC bar code maintenance, X12 message sets, binding standards development, its joint meeting with ALA, and its newsletter--SISAC NEWS.

BASIC holds its committee meeting every two month in New York City. During the meeting, the members not only discuss its business but also have educational programs which intend to introduce new information notion and technology, such as Internet2, Digital Objective Identifier (DOI), and metadata, etc., and to seek standards for electronic information transaction.

SISAC continues to work on making serials librarians' life easier through the promotion of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards and keeps committing itself in the development of X12 and EDIFACT transactions by allying with BASIC in the elaboration of additional EDIFACT transaction sets that will be appropriate for both serials and monographs. By utilizing EDI messages, now library is able to process electronic ordering, invoicing, claiming and claiming response. However, subscription renewal still is a troublesome issue in implementing EDI standards. The discussion and testing are aiming at the resolution of this problem. Some new ideas were brought in SISAC meeting. For example, library can use Agent Subscription Identifier (ASID) to get an EDI quote before the process of renewals.

In addition to being actively engaged in EDI standards experiment, SISAC also takes the responsibility of education. Through presentation and workshops in American Library Association (ALA) and North America Serials Interest Group (NASIG), and other national and international conferences, SISAC members have been advocates of adopting standards and working very hard to inform librarians for EDI and its benefits for the librarians on time, cost, and staff savings. SISAC's webpage has listed ILS vendors who adopt part or all of BISAC, SISAC, or EDItEUR EDI Message sets (http://www.bookwire.com/bisg/vendors.html). Thanks to persistent efforts of SISAC, serials community has realized more and more common interests among the library, ILS vendor, subscription agencies, and publishers for implementing the EDIFACT standards.

Serials Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) and SICI Bar Code have been the SISAC's major contributions to the serials world at the digital age. The new version of SISAC Bar Code Symbol Guidelines which was planned to be released last spring is postponed for some technical reasons. However, on the SISAC's homepage, a list of publishers that include the SICI bar-code on their periodical issues is available (http://www.bookwire.com/bisg/sisac-barcode.html).

In order to define the transmission format for binding information, SISAC set up a new Binding Task Force in the fall of 1998. The 1996 version of NISO/ANSI Z39.76 (Data Elements for Binding Library Materials) defines only the data elements to be included in a binding process, but didn't regulate the format. SISAC is planning to have binding data transmitted as an EDIFACT message. The purposes of the Task Force are to test and then settle suitable EDIFACT message and provide implementation instructions and guidelines, as it did for other serials process module, such as invoicing and claiming.

Submitted by

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