Greg Barniskis asked:
On 6/28/2011 7:22 AM, MJ Ray wrote:
As you may know, Galen and myself were invited to discuss the SIP 3 draft that 3M are preparing.
On the one hand, it is really very nice that open source developers are being invited by 3M into this process (ditto for you inviting us in as well, to the extent that you're allowed to). ++ all around.
On the other hand, I am wondering why effort on 3M SIP would be more valuable in the long term than comparable effort on the continued evolution (and adoption) of NCIP?
I've read the March 2010 press release from 3M about the SIP 3 development process, and was a bit surprised to see that it gives a small nod to "ISO standards" but doesn't even mention NCIP. Is the NCIP development process broken?
Others have suggested that SIP is much more widespread than NCIP. That's been the co-op's experience too. Personally, I don't much care which US corporation develops standards. I care more about how they do it. 3M have invited us in. NISO have not. It's not clear to me whether NCIP's process allows anyone who's not a NISO member to participate (I've read the NISO Procedures cited on ncip.info and I still don't know - I'm often a bit thick when it comes to bureaucracy) and there doesn't appear to be a membership class for non-library co-ops (even OCLC seems to have joined as a "large non-profit" rather than a group of libraries). While I'm not wild about SIP's by-invitation process, it'd be better than pay-to-play. To me, the killer thing is the copyright permission notices: although we're not allowed to develop SIP independently of 3M (boo!), we are expressly permitted to implement it. NCIP's notice is the usual "prior permission in writing" stupidity - anyone know if someone writing the NCIP code (is that from Evergreen?) actually had that, or if there's some other permission notice I've overlooked? But that's an abyss I'm not going to look into very soon. Hope that helps, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for various work through http://www.software.coop/