Thursday, April 10, 2008

Innovative Interfaces abstains from DLF initiative

While waiting for paint to dry (literally) at 2 am, came across this.

At code4lib, we heard from Terry Reese and Emily Lynema about the DLF's initiative to create standards interfaces for ILSs to support external discovery services. An announcement from Peter Brantley confirms that a basic set of these has been adopted under the title "ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces: A proposal for the ILS community."

The proposal's goals are modest, but nonetheless set a baseline of functionality that most ILS vendors should be able to provide without a whole lot of difficulty:
1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.

2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.

3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.
The proposal is undersigned by the following vendors:
  1. Talis
  2. Ex Libris
  3. LibLime
  4. BiblioCommons
  5. SirsiDynix
  6. Polaris Library Systems
  7. VTLS
  8. California Digital Library
  9. OCLC
  10. AquaBrowser

Abstention:

  1. Innovative Interfaces, Inc.
Innovative Interfaces is clearly making a bold statement here by not going along with the crowd. Not sure what it is, though.

1 comment:

Morris said...

Knowing III the statement they are making is that they will come up with their own method of accomplishing this and then charge their customers an arm or a leg for it. Typical