At the national ASI meeting in May 2001, board members voted to continue ASI membership in the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). NISO is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop and promote technical standards for use in information delivery by libraries, publishers, and related information technology organizations. All NISO standards are developed to meet the needs of both information users and producers.

Membership in NISO provides ASI the opportunity to review proposed information standards. In the early years of NISO membership, the ASI representative to NISO defeated an information standard that would have required coding every word in an index—a nearly impossible task! As publishers move into e-books and other new forms of information delivery, ASI must remain active in NISO and vigilant to ensure that standards continue to serve the interests of both indexers and index users.

Issues of the NISO Newsline can be accessed at: http://www.niso.org/news/newsline. NISO Newsline is an executive summary of noteworthy articles pertaining to information standards and is distributed to the NISO community each month. 

For more information:
National Information Standards Organization
4733 Bethesda Avenue, Suite 300
Bethesda, MD 20814
voice: 301/654-2512
fax: 301/654-1721
nisohq@niso.org
www.niso.org