The new draft of the ILS-Discovery recommendations I mentioned in my last post is now out. You can download it, and read more about it, on our task force wiki.

As I mentioned previously, we intend this draft to be the last release before the official final version. We don’t expect to change the basic recommended functions in major ways in the final draft, though there’s a lot more that can be said and done to promote interoperability beyond these first steps we’ve taken.

We are very interested in correcting and clarifying anything that is erroneous, ambiguous, or unclear, particularly in the Level 1 functionality we recommend. Comments can be emailed to me (“ockerblo” at “pobox.upenn.edu”) between now and Friday, May 9; I’ll pass them along to the task force working on this. We hope to do our final revisions and then release the official recommendation not long afterwards.

The task force will also be conducting a birds-of-a-feather discussion session at next week’s DLF Spring Forum in Minneapolis. The session will be held at 2:30 on Tuesday, April 29, in Greenway B on the second floor of the conference hotel. Topics of discussion include the Berkeley accord (the agreement with vendors and developers that informed this draft), the draft recommendation and its upcoming finalization, implementing the recommendation, and how to continue and build on efforts to promote and standardize interoperation between the ILS and discovery applications.

I’m still working on an example implementation of the Level 1 functions, but have been busy enough with the draft not to finish it yet (or blog about much else lately; there are some other topics in the pipeline, though!) I hope to point to that soon. And if you’re interested in our recommendation or what it’s trying to accomplish, I hope to hear from you. And maybe I’ll see you in Minneapolis next week.