The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of maintenance revisions of two widely used standards: The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol. Both standards were revised to make very minor updates.
The Dublin Core standard defines 15 metadata elements for resource description in a cross-disciplinary information environment and is reportedly used as the basis for most metadata standards in use today. The SUSHI Protocol defines an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data and is required for conformance with the COUNTER Code of Practice.
Thomas Baker, Chief Information Officer for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the maintenance agency for the Dublin Core standard, has explained that the DCMI usage board has approved a change to the usage comment for the 'subject' element to eliminate some ambiguity with the 'coverage' element. The new version of the ANSI/NISO standard corresponds to version 1.1 of the specification on the DCMI website.
Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist for EBSCO Information Services and Co-chair of the SUSHI Standing Committee, has stated that the SUSHI Standing Committee has initiated this revision of the standard to make two minor updates. An additional error code was added and the appendix about security considerations was updated to reflect technology changes and experience gained since the initial implementation of the SUSHI protocol.
Both standards are available for free download from the NISO website; Dublin Core at www.niso.org/standards/z39-85-2012 and SUSHI at www.niso.org/standards/z39-93-2013/.
