What’s the deal with NCIP? For those that don’t know, NCIP is the NISO protocol that attempts to “define the various transactions needed to support circulation activities among independent library systems.” For example, “patron and item inquiry and update transactions, such as hold or reserve, check-out, renew, and check-in.”
I came away from a meeting yesterday at the State Library of Ohio on plans to investigate a new statewide resource sharing system somewhat confused about the state of this standard. Those in the meeting were pessimistic, based apparently on experience with prior products that claimed to be “NCIP compliant,” about the standard’s ability to truly “support circulation activities among independent library systems.” From what I could gather, even with the approved standard and implementations that can claim compliance with the standard, there is enough variability in interpretation that bilateral testing and agreement on meanings of messages was still required to make it work. And that so much flexibility was possible that such bilateral testing and agreement is a very time consuming process.
A little searching turned up the NCIP Implementation Group website hosted and maintained by EnvisionWare, Inc. It seems somewhat stagnant, though (the link to the discussion mailing list leads to a 404-not-found error page). I stopped following NCIP a number of years ago, but I thought I understood the basic concepts and remember thinking that what was going on was a good thing. In fact, I assumed, based on what remember from those several years ago, that the issue of inter-ILS circulation communication was a solved problem. Fast forwarding to now, is the world of inter-ILS communication really this bad? Is anything being done to solve it? Does “NCIP Compliant” actually mean anything?
2 Comments
No. When I first started reading the specs, I thought
that it might allow a given library to connect to another,
arbitrary, library that was known to have the desired item. But
that’s not how it works at core. A library can only send requests
to libraries with which it has negotiated a trust relationship
outside of the NCIP world. This is why, at LITA Forum ‘06 in
Nashville, OCLC kept talking up their “star” model: everybody
trusts OCLC, so you send requests to us, and we’ll broker between
library systems.”
Hmmm. I, too, had certainly envisioned a more free-flowing model, not a hub-and-spoke model (no matter who was in the center). Thanks for the reply, David.
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