The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the UKSG have announced that BioOne, JSTOR, LOCKSS, the Royal Society of Chemistry and SpringerLink are the most recent organisations to publicly endorse the Phase I recommendations of the KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working Group. The group is a joint NISO/UKSG initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain. KBART's Phase I Recommended Practice, published in January 2010, contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.
All content providers, from major databases to small publishers, are encouraged to 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, 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 at www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart where content providers and knowledge base developers can register their organisation's information for downloading holdings metadata.
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 e-book, consortia and open access metadata.
