The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is a United States non-profit standards organization that develops, maintains and publishes technical standards related to publishing, bibliographic and library applications. It was founded in 1939, incorporated as a not-for-profit education association in 1983, and assumed its current name in 1984. Todd Carpenter was appointed Managing Director of NISO in 2006.
NISO is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and is designated by ANSI to represent U.S. interests to the International Organization for Standardization's Technical Committee 46 (Information and Documentation). In 2008, NISO was appointed Secretariat on behalf of ANSI for the TC 46 Subcommittee 9 (TC 46/SC 9) - Identification and Description.
NISO approved standards are published by ANSI. Unlike most other ANSI standards, many NISO standards are freely available from its web site.
Designations (names) of NISO standards all start with "ANSI/NISO Z39." (read zee or zed thirty nine dot).
Examples of NISO standards include:
- Z39.2 (MARC standards for bibliographic records)
- Z39.50 (a protocol for accessing bibliographic databases)
- Z39.83 (Circulation Interchange Protocol for library catalogue data exchange)
- Z39.86 (Specifications for the Digital Talking Book: DAISY Digital Accessible Information SYstem)
- Z39.87 (Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images - MIX)
- Z39.88 (OpenURL)
In addition to formal standards, NISO also publishes recommended practices, technical reports and other consensus documents.
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“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“If one doesn’t know one’s own country, one doesn’t have standards for foreign countries.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)