Five more publishers endorse KBART

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BioOne, JSTOR, LOCKSS, the Royal Society of Chemistry and SpringerLink (hosted by Metapress) are the most recent organisations to publicly endorse the Phase I recommendations of the KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working Group.

This joint NISO/UKSG initiative is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain. KBART’s Phase I Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2010), published in January 2010, contains recommendations for exchanging accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.

All content providers, from major databases to small publishers, can 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 where content providers and knowledge base developers can register their organisation’s information for downloading holdings metadata.

Sarah Price, KBART co-chair and e-resources & serials coordinator at the University of Birmingham, UK commented: '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.