The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the replacement of the maintenance agency for the two-part American National Standard on the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP), ANSI/NISO Z39.83, with a Standing Committee for ongoing maintenance of the standard. 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. The NCIP protocol is widely supported in integrated library systems (ILS) and resource sharing software.
A number of supporting tools and documentation have been developed to aid in implementation. These include an XML schema that matches the implementation profile defined in Part 2 of the standard, an Introduction to NCIP to provide 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 defines a minimal set of nine messages (out of the full set of 45) that supports the majority of the current functionality for resource sharing and self-service applications and provides a simpler starting point for new implementers.
The NCIP standard and the supporting tools and documentation are freely available at: www.ncip.info/.
