Q: Who writes the standards?
A: You do!
This was my take-away message from the recent conference of the American Library Association. The library world likes standardization, or formalizing the best way to exchange bits of information. I attended quite a few sessions about standards and realized a few things:
1) NISO only employs four people. FOUR! That means that all of the actual work filtered through them is done by volunteers. Still, how do they organize all of that work and have time to show up at conferences and have breath to talk? I do not know. It is impressive.
2) Standards are written by real people. I assumed Adam Chandler hovered an inch or two off the ground or had some vague glow about him, but when I saw him give a presentation on ANSI/NISO Z39.93 (aka SUSHI) I realized that he is human, just like the rest of us. And he needs help implementing the new standard, so if you’re interested, get in touch with him.
3) Standards are not “They.” Standards are “Us”. At the NISO update at the conference I saw a brief presentation on two working groups, with hopes that they will someday be standards. In order to become standards, lots of discussion has to happen first to get agreement on what is actually the best way to do something. I2 and KBART are such working groups. These working groups are lead by people interested in making information exchange smoother and more efficient. In other words, these groups are lead by people like you and me.
Get involved! NISO has a nice web page about how to do just that: http://www.niso.org/participate/
