NISO Receives Mellon Foundation Grant to Support Standards Development Pre-work with the Internet Archive for E-Book Annotation Sharing"

From a NISO Announcement:

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, organization, and direct meeting expenses for the two workshops, for which NISO will conduct the majority of the planning, organization and logistical support.

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“The ability to accurately refer to a specific location within a digital text is fundamental for bookmarking and annotations,” explained Peter Brantley, Director, BookServer Project at the Internet Archive. “For both casual readers as well as professional and academic researchers, such pointers must be recognized across reading systems to enable social uses of books that range from personal memory aids, to citations and critical analysis, as well as deep inter-linking. The golden combination of portability and translatability will enable sharing of commentary, whether in reading circles, classrooms, or critical societies.”

Mr. Brantley continued, “Despite efforts in various communities to address these issues, for a number of reasons no single solution has been able to take hold. In an environment of interchange, such as social reading and annotation sharing, having the community adhere to an interoperable standard will go a long way to fostering the widespread adoption and use of annotation systems. Several key community organizations and leading applications have expressed a willingness to support a consensus structure if one were to be created relatively quickly. We are very hopeful that the meetings to be held in October will advance such a structure and are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its recognition and support.”

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