The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), US, has announced the publication of the two-part American National Standard on the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP), ANSI/NISO Z39.83. NCIP addresses the need for interoperability among disparate circulation, interlibrary loan, consortial borrowing and self-service applications by standardising the exchange of messages between and among computer-based applications.
Part 1 of the standard defines the Protocol and Part 2: Implementation Profile provides a practical implementation structure. The NCIP protocol is said to be widely supported in integrated library systems (ILS) and resource sharing software.
Mike Dicus, Product Manager at Ex Libris Group and Co-chair of the NCIP Standing Committee, said the latest edition of NCIP, version 2.02, incorporated implementers' feedback and experience into the standard with changes that improved the usefulness and practicality of the various services. One of the larger changes in 2.02 is the addition of a Lookup Item Set service. This service allows an initiator to query with a single request a set of items that may share some kind of relationship, such as multiple volumes of a book set. Additionally, Bibliographic Record Id has been made repeatable within Bibliographic Description.
Rob Walsh, representative for EnvisionWare and the Maintenance Agency for NCIP, said that in addition to the standard, the NCIP Standing Committee had made available supporting tools and documentation to aid in implementation. An XML schema is available that matches the implementation profile defined in Part 2 of the standard. The document 'Introduction to NCIP' provides librarians and other implementers with a basic introduction to NCIP and links to sources of additional information about the standard.
The NCIP Core Message Set is also stated to define a minimal set of nine messages that supports the majority of the current functionality for resource sharing and self-service applications and provides a simpler starting point for new implementers. An NCIP Implementer Registry collects information about vendors' implementations-specifically which versions and which messages are supported.
