ILS-DI

Convened by DLF in 2007, the Integrated Library System (ILS) Discovery Interface Task Group was charged with recommending standard interfaces for the ILS to integrate with new discovery tools and systems. The recommendation released in December 2008 was applauded by the library technology community, but did not result in a generic solution as DLF did not have the resources to create complete schema requirements, develop open source toolkits, or monitor vendor compliance.

This project attracted new interest and attention from participants at Code4Lib 2010. The goal was to achieve actual code implementations of ILS-DI recommendations across all ILSs by bringing together those who have written ILS-DI (or related) code with those who want standardized ILS adapters, including representatives from open source discovery projects (such as VuFind and eXtensible Catalog) as well as from discovery interface vendors (such as OCLC and Serials Solutions).

A survey of the community indicated that first efforts should focus on reusable services for item availability and patron functionality. As these priorities meshed closely with the goals of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project’s NCIP toolkit, this existing tool was recommended as a platform for achieving a reusable set of services across a variety of integrated library systems. In addition to the core NCIP toolkit code, XC project partners had also created a number of individual ILS connectors.