NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol

1. NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol A Standard in Development ZIG Tutorial January 19, 2000

2. Topics • The Committee - Charge & Composition • Work to date • Approach • Progress • Future Challenges

3. Committee Charge - What • Define transactions • needed for circulation activities • among independent library systems. • Facilitate • direct patron borrowing, • remote patron authentication, • on-line payment, and • controlled access to electronic documents.

4. Step 1- Understand & Plan • Understand today’s environment • Activities in and among libraries • Existing standards environment • Existing solutions • Determine • What a standard protocol can do • How best to achieve it

5. Step 2- Check the plan • Published a Guidelines document • Proposed Standard, Purpose and Scope • Related Standards • Technical Assumptions and Plans • Work-to-date • Activities Supported • Message State

6. The Standard and Scope • A repertoire of messages & associated rules of syntax and semantics • Between and among computer-based applications • to effect circulation • to support controlled access to certain electronic resources or other library services • Not to define circulation functions

7. Supports 4 application areas • Direct consortial borrowing • Circulation/Interlibrary Loan Interaction • Self-service Circulation • Access to Electronic Resources • The standard’s test bed • It must support these, may support others

8. Standards environment • 3M Standard Interchange Protocol • ISO 8459-4:1997 Bibliographic Data Element Directory: Part 4: Circulation Application • ISO 10160/61 Interlibrary Loan Application Service Definition & Protocol Specification • ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995 Information Retrieval: Application Service Definition and Protocol (ISO 23950)

9. 3M Standard Interchange Protocol • De facto standard for self checkout • Extended to support other functions • Allows the committee to build from a base of practical applications • 3M and other vendors experienced with the SIP are active participants

10. A Goal -- as possible • Use existing definitions and terminology • Permit developers to meld standards into a single application

11. Technical Assumptions and Design Principles • Keep it simple and within purpose • Confirmed Service -- Pairs of messages • Initiation -- response pairs • Each message carries full context necessary for processing • Requires connection-oriented transport • Simple State Table • governs messaging not circulation

12. Message Syntax, Transport Protocol and Encoding • Body of library standards specified in ASN.1 • Body of library standards/applications using BER for encoding • Web world appears to be adopting XML for both specification and encoding • Committee will get expert help to make this decision

13. Step 3 -- Draft a standard • Develop Services and Messages • 3 Services • Query tell me something about • Request please take an action • Notification I have taken an action

14. Messages • about 5 things (objects) • Users • Items • Transactions • Agencies (Libraries) • Systems (Applications)

15. Where are we now? • Service Definitions: Query, Request, Notify 2nd draft • Message list for each service 2nd draft • Message Definitions 2nd draft • 4 groups charged with defining data structures and elements • User, Item, Transaction, Agency and System

16. Next Steps • GOAL -- Draft Standard for Trial Use • Allow for implementations prior to ballot • Steps • Complete and refine message definitions • Seek expert advice on transfer encoding • Develop structure for profile documents that describe use in a particular application • DSFTU - August 2000

17. Challenges/Questions • When does this committee stop? • After defining messages • After defining a sample profile with encoding mechanism • How to promote and support initial implementations

18. URL’s • http://www.niso.org/commitat.html • http://www.niso.org/drafts/Z3982v1.html

19. Questions? pat_stevens@oclc.org