The Digital Library Federation's ILS and Discovery Systems working group has issued a Draft Recommendation investigating issues related to integrated library system and discovery system integration.
Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":
This document is the (DRAFT) report of that group. It gives technical recommendations for integrating the ILS with external discovery applications. This report includes
- A summary of a survey of the needs and discovery applications implemented and desired by libraries in DLF (and other similar libraries).
- A high-level summary of specific abstract functions that discovery applications need to be able to invoke on ILS's and/or their data to support desired discovery applications, as well as outgoing services from ILS software to other applications.
- Recommendations for concrete bindings for these functions (i.e. specific protocols, APIs, data standards, etc.) that can be used with future and/or existing ILS's. Producing a complete concrete binding and reference implementation is beyond the scope of this small, short-term group; but we hope to provide sufficient requirements and details that others can produce appropriate bindings and implementations.
- Practical recommendations to encourage libraries, ILS developers, and discovery application developers to expeditiously integrate discovery systems with the ILS and other sources of bibliographic metadata.
