Early this spring, a community of library developers interested in interoperability between discovery interfaces and integrated library systems formed a working group to build on the work of the DLF ILS-DI Task force. After several months of collaboration between this developer community, OCLC team members and the eXtensible Catalog Organization, we are excited to announce OCLC’s plans to contribute an implementation of version 2.0 of the NCIP standard, derived from the OCLC Web-scale Management Services codebase, to the eXtensible Catalog’s open-source NCIP Toolkit. This will allow the XC NCIP Toolkit to migrate to an NCIP 2.0 platform (from the current 1.0) at an expedited rate. This contribution will advance the library community’s efforts to simplify interoperability options for any library or software provider that wishes to include item availability and other information from the integrated library system in its discovery interface display.
With the contribution of this open-source code, OCLC will help to extend the great work of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) development group with support for NCIP 2.0. The first contribution, expected this month, will support the NCIP Lookup Item service, which was determined to be the highest priority for the ILS-DI Task Force. Support for this message enables libraries to retrieve item status from their ILS in real time, making it possible for third-party discovery interfaces such as the eXtensible Catalog, VuFind and WorldCat Local to incorporate this in their displays to patrons. Following this initial release, OCLC will work in conjunction with the Task Force members to establish a project plan to expand both the number of supported NCIP 2.0 services and ILS connection components.
The software will be licensed under the MIT License, which allows for commercial reuse.
To learn more about this contribution, please contact Randall Cook of the eXtensible Catalog project (rcook@library.rochester.edu) or Karen A. Coombs, Product Manager for the OCLC Developer Network (coombsk@oclc.org).