The NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite
The NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite (also called the NLM DTD although it is available in DTD, XSD, and RNG forms) provides a common XML format for preserving the intellectual content of journal articles, independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. The Tag Suite consists of Tag Sets for Archiving, Publishing, and Authoring journal article content and a Tag Set for Books and book material. The Tag Sets have been widely adopted by archives, libraries, and publishers and are supported by many data conversion vendors and XML tools.
Since 2003, Mulberry has been working with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a center of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), to create and maintain the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite. In support of the NCBI Tag Suite group, we at Mulberry have written and maintained the Tag Suite code including the DTDs, XSDs, and RNGs, and much of the Tag Suite documentation, in particular, all of the Tag Set Tag Libraries.
Mulberry provides consulting and support services to users of the Tag Sets, including publishers, archives, and content repackagers. We have:
- Created customizations and subsets of these Tag Sets;
- Designed and tuned workflows that include journals and books that use the Tag Sets;
- Provided QA for content converted into XML using one of the Tag Sets;
- Taught publisher personnel to read, use, and adapt the Tag Sets to their needs; and
- Created customized versions of Tag Set documentation for publishers which include the publisher’s in-house practices, exclude structures the publisher doesn’t use, and use the publisher’s content for all examples.
Mulberry has recently created a list of questions we are frequently asked about the NLM Tag Sets, and specifically about the release of Version 3.0 of the Tag Sets. See the Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite Questions and Answers.
Additional articles and resources relating to the Tag Sets include:
- A Non-backwards-compatible Update: A Difficult Decision, a presentation about the decision to optimize version 3.0 of the Tag Sets for future users, but not be backwards compatible with previous versions
- New Public Domain Journal Article Archiving and Interchange DTDs presented by Jeff Beck and Deborah Lapeyre