Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Ole Holst Andersen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Linus Ericson – Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Boris Goldowsky – CAST
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Participating Experts:

• Kathy Kahl, Scribe – DAISY Consortium
• Lynn Leith – DAISY Consortium
• Diana Hiorth Persson – Dolphin
• Jennifer Sutton – DAISY Consortium, Consultant

Apologies:

• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare
• Rob Longstaff – Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB)
• Daniel Weck –DAISY for All Project

Agenda

The agenda for the call was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on November 6. There were no additions to the agenda.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

The next conference call is 2007 November 21, 0900 Eastern USA and will continue bi-monthly at the same time through the end of the 2007, with calls scheduled on December 5, and December 19.

Requirements Gathering Web site

The new post of the overview at www.daisy.org/z3986/requirements/ was approved. Jennifer asked for help reviewing the latest requirements regarding Relax NG and W3C Schema.

NISO Terms of Reference

This document has been circulated and George is concerned about two things: 1) the term 'NISO Advisory Board' might be confused with the term 'DAISY Advisory Board'; 2) unresolved questions about exactly how to join and how many can join.

Per George, it is decided that 1) nominations will be reviewed by the existing committee; 2) a vote will be taken as to whether to accept the nomination; 3) individuals may appeal to NISO who may intervene in their behalf; 4) if no position is available, nominees will be put on a waiting list to see if a position becomes available, and meanwhile they may participate as an invited expert. It was noted that we could have more people on the call than voting members.

Lynn asked if we have the goal of getting committee members from around the globe. George said it was usually the case that mainly NISO members were involved and that there is usually a scarcity of participants.

Maintenance Activity

George requested that the 2005 DTD and other items in the Issues Tracking area be reviewed at the next meeting. A new DTD release is recommended sooner rather than later.

George, James, and Laurie were reviewing submitted issues periodically but there has been no progress for several months. Linus, Markus, James, and Lloyd were on the DTD Team. The current situation is that some of the submitted issues are borderline as to being either bug fixes or new features. The policy is to restrict ourselves to bug fixes. New features are out of scope except as submitted to RG. The example of 'page numbers within tables' was at first thought to be borderline, as perhaps a new feature but identified instead as a bug, in that the intention all along is to enable page numbering.

James outlined the procedure that had been working and it was agreed to continue this process: 1) the maintenance team sorts issues into big buckets, i.e. dismiss as of out of scope, duplicates, or new future directions; 2) these assignments are then reviewed by the Zed committee; 3) the ones that do need addressing are assigned to someone with discussion of what is needed; 4) the responsible person implements a solution. This keeps the work confined to a smaller group with referral to the larger group for verification. The addition to the procedure is that any item in the submitted issues that is identified as a "Future Direction" is to be entered in the RG database at the time of issue resolution but also stay in the issues database.

James volunteered again to be the editor of the new DTD, and to then distribute it to others for testing. Kathy is to continue to facilitate emails and scheduled maintenance calls until the issues are cleaned up.