Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY Consortium
• Linus Ericson – Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille (TPB)
• Reuben Firmin – Benetech
• Hiromitsu Fujimori – Shinano Kenshi Co., Ltd.
• Boris Goldowsky – CAST
• Mats Johnson – Dolphin
• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

• John Brugge – Benetech
• Kathy Kahl – DAISY Consortium
• Ken Silberman - NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center
• Aaron Cannon - LDS Church (accessibility)
• Per Sennels - Huseby Resource Centre for the Vision Impaired in Norway (UK)

Apologies:

• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic

Agenda

The call agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on September 2. There were no additions to the agenda.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

The FTF Meeting is scheduled for September 16-18 at Google. The date of the next call will be determined at that meeting.

FTF Update

The meetings are scheduled from 8:30-5 on Tuesday and Wednesday, and until 4 on Thursday but we are planning on finishing around 1. Anyone planning on staying longer than that can use the room. Instructions for how to get to Google and the badge process will be sent out. George will query who is at the main hotel so no one is missed when the shuttle is ready to leave. We will plan to leave the hotel around 8:00. He asked that everyone try to get through the badge process at Google and to the meeting room so we can start promptly at 8:30. The agenda is posted on the ZedNext Wiki.

NISO Update

Karen Wetzel had said she would join this call, but in her absence, George reviewed specific requests made on a phone call yesterday with Markus Gylling, Karen Wetzel, Todd Carpenter, NISO Managing Director, and Ted Koppel, co-chair of the NISO Content and Collection Management Committee. Ted's group needs to officially approve the members of the Z39.86 revision working group. They know that a lot of people are watching this with 45 people now on the z3986@daisy.org list, but they want to know who are the core members of the working group and their affiliations. They expressed concern that not enough traditional publishers were involved. Their experience is that a small working group, using the number of 12 to define what is meant by small, is the best way to move the process forward. The other piece that was discussed is the need to move forward quickly with some problems regarding the existing standard.

We have talked about moving the revision forward by the use of 2 threads. We would start with the work on the XML vocabulary and follow with work on the distribution aspect of the Standard. This would give us time to work with NISO on getting more key players such as publishers on board to work on the distribution part which is probably of most interest to them. We'd like to get going on the XML vocabulary by using the larger group to decide fundamental architectural decisions and then give a small group the heavy job of implementation. A draft standard of the XML vocabulary could potentially be available for test use by early 2009 and then work could proceed on the distribution portion.

Finally NISO is asking that we use their Web site for the interactive documents, document collection, and their email list for this work. The z3986 list now includes 45 people. We can use that until knowing how to use the NISO list.