The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has been awarded a $48,500 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund two standards incubation workshops, which it will lead with the Internet Archive, on the topic of E-Book Annotation Sharing and Social Reading. These meetings will be held in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany, on October 10, 2011, and the Books In Browsers Meeting in San Francisco, on October 26, 2011. The Mellon Foundation grant will pay for the planning, organisation, and direct meeting expenses for the two workshops, for which NISO will conduct the majority of the planning, organisation and logistical support.
The two workshops will seek to advance the discussions around system requirements for annotation sharing - including technical challenges of citation location and systems interoperability - and around the development and implementation of a consensus solution for these issues. The objectives of the meetings are to provide input to a NISO-sponsored working group on scope, goals and any initial work the group undertakes; and the advancement of a syntax specification that will be further vetted by a standards working group for how bookmarks and annotations are located and shared in digital books.
An invitational planning meeting to discuss issues surrounding bookmarking and annotation and possible areas for standards creation in this space took place on May 26, 2011 at the Kimmel Center, New York University, during the week of the Book Expo America conference. Approximately 20 participants representing scholars, scholarly and technical publishing, e-book software and hardware vendors, online book services, and foundations met for more than five hours to discuss existing projects, the general annotation landscape, and further requirements and desirable features for workable standards that could be quickly, easily adopted by a broad range of industry participants. The group also discussed work to be done before any further meetings could take place and further parties who should be engaged.
More information about the October meetings, which will be open to the public, is available on the NISO website at www.niso.org/topics/ccm/e-book_annotation. Each meeting will include both invited speakers and breakout discussions. Participants will include technologists involved in the development of systems as well as librarians and scholars who would be the direct beneficiaries of annotation and social reading functionality.
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