Free half-day event will precede ALA Conference in Washington, DC

New York, NY (June 5, 2007) -- On June 22, the Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will present a free, half-day forum in Washington, DC, "The Changing Standards Landscape: Creative Solutions to Your Information Problems." The forum, to be held at the Renaissance Washington's Grand Ballroom (North), will immediately precede the American Library Association Annual Conference.

BISG's Executive Director, Michael Healy, and NISO's Managing Director, Todd Carpenter, will lead the forum through three main agenda items:

The Changing Model for Standards Development

• United Action for Common Problems
  
• The Importance of Standards
  

Emerging and Established Standards for Successful Content Management

• Identify & Describe, which will explore the chief characteristics of successful identifiers and metadata. Speakers will be Norman Paskin, Tertius Ltd. and Founding Director, International DOI Foundation and Brian Green, Executive Director, ISBN/EDItEUR.
  
• Discover & Retrieve, which will examine why understanding standards related to online search, browse, and retrieval will be essential not only for exploiting new economic models like e-books or page pay-per-view, but for facilitating the online marketing of physical books as well. The presenter for this session will be Carolyn Pittis, Senior Vice President, Global Marketing Strategy and Operations, HarperCollins.
  
• Comply & Use, which will offer two perspectives on the complex exercise of communicating access and use permissions. The speakers will be Nathan Robertson, Electronic Resources Librarian, Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland School of Law and Mark Bide, Senior Consultant, Rightscom, who will address the unique collaboration known as the ACAP project.
  

A Roundtable Discussion will look at "What now?"

Media Contact:
Angela Bole
Deputy Executive Director
Book Industry Study Group, Inc.
646-336-7141
angela@bisg.org
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About Book Industry Study Group, Inc.
The Book Industry Study Group, Inc. (BISG) is the U.S. book industry's leading trade association for policy, standards and research. The mission of BISG is to create a more informed, empowered, and efficient book industry supply chain. Membership consists of publishers, manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, librarians, and others engaged in the business of print and electronic media. For 30 years, BISG has provided a forum for all industry professionals to come together and efficiently address issues and concerns to advance the book community.

Learn more about BISG at www.bisg.org.

About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators and other organizations that support learning, research and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Learn more about NISO at www.niso.org.

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