Existing Best Practices and Standards

There are many working definitions of 'best practices', but generally, they are similar to this one, adapted from a definition penned by the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers (CACEE):

A Best Practice is an optimal process which:

• is recognized by peers in similar situations
• is applicable to a cross-section of organizations with varying resources and sizes
• takes ethical, legal, and moral requirements into consideration

Many organizations provide documentation of best practices in their particular fields as a resource for their constituents. For example, The World Wide Web Consortium is a world leader in establishing best practices for the various compatible technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) that lead the Web toward its potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. NLC will strive to make this manual play a similar role for electronic publishing in Canada.

Best practices frequently involve the use of Standards. The US Federal Glossary of Telecommunication Terms defines 'standard' as follows:

• Guideline documentation that reflects agreements on products, practices, or operations by nationally or internationally recognized industrial, professional, trade associations or governmental bodies. This includes formal, approved standards, as contrasted to de facto standards and proprietary standards, which are exceptions to this concept.
• An exact value, a physical entity, or an abstract concept, established and defined by authority, custom, or common consent to serve as a reference, model, or rule in measuring quantities or qualities, establishing practices or procedures, or evaluating results. A fixed quantity or quality.

In the milieu of electronic publishing, practices and goals vary widely from publisher to publisher, and professional and governmental organizations dealing with new media are relatively new entities. Still, there are a number of standards committees and bodies (such as the W3 Consortium) which set the benchmarks thsat guarantee that computers can interact. However, because the notion of 'central authority' in the online environment is contentious at best, there are also 'de facto' standards which are defined by custom or common consent rather than authority.