Last June I gave a presentation in a NISO webinar about the work a number of colleagues and I did for the Digital Library Federation to recommend standard interfaces for Integrated Library Systems (the systems that keep track of our library’s acquisitions, catalog, and circulation) to support a wide variety of tools and applications for discovery.   Our “ILS-DI” recommendation was published in 2008, and encompassed a number of functions that some ILS’s supported.  But it also included many functions that were not generally, or uniformly, supported by ILS’s of the time.  That’s still the case today.

As I said in my presentation last June, “If we look at the ILS-DI process as a development spiral, we’ve moved from a specification stage  to an implementation stage.”  My hope has been that vendors and other library software implementers would implement the basics of what we recommended– as many agreed to— and the library community could progress from there.  This often takes longer to achieve than one might hope.

But I’m happy to report that the Code4lib community is now picking up the ball.  At this month’s Code4lib conference, a group met to discuss “collaboratively develop[ing] a middleware infrastructure” to link together ILS’s and discovery tools, based on the work done by the DLF’s ILS-DI group and by the developers of systems like Jangle and XC.  The middleware would help power discovery applications like Blacklight, VuFind, Summon, WorldCat Local, and whatever else the digital library community might invent.

I wasn’t at the Code4lib conference, but the group that met there to kick off the effort has impressive collective expertise and accomplishments.   It includes several members of the DLF’s ILS-DI group, as well as the lead implementors of several relevant systems.  Roy Tennant from OCLC Research is coordinating the initial activity, and Emily Lynema of the ILS-DI group has converted the Google groups space used by the ILS-DI group for the new effort.

And you’re welcome to join too, if you’d like to help out or learn more. “This is an open, collaborative effort” is how Roy put it in the announcement of the new initiative.  Due to some prior commitments, I’ll personally be watching more than actively participating, at least to begin with, but I’ll be watching with great interest.  To find out more, and to get involved, see the Google Group.