article on next-generation discovery systems

The WSU Libs will soon be employing a "Group" view of the WorldCat.org platform to support patron discovery. This search system, an enhanced version of the existing Summit catalog, is scheduled to become available around December 1. A recent article, authored by Marshall Breeding, provides updated info on so-called "next-generation" discovery systems.

This article references the materials produced by the Digital Library Federation's ILS Discovery Interface Task Force. The key areas identified by the DLF (harvesting, availability, and linking) are being tackled in the Orbis Cascade Alliance's implementation of WorldCat Navigator (WCN), a new product being developed by OCLC that will be available in early 2009. WCN uses a WorldCat Group catalog to support discovery, along with a staff processing system (Navigator Request Engine, previously VDX) and a Circulation Gateway software tool that supports NCIP-based interoperability between NRE and library circulation/integrated systems that don't support NCIP.

Innovative Interfaces was the one participating vendor which refused to endorse the Task Force's recommendations, as described in this summary. It should be noted that III released an API for its Encore discovery system in the past week. I haven't read any reviews of this API, but based upon the news release, it appears to be an add-on product to Encore (that is, part of the "Encore suite"). In summary, it's a step in the right direction, but not the DLF vision that's summarized in this article.

I hope to dig deeper into the Task Force's work and referenced materials. Working on the WCN implementation has given me a greater appreciation of the importance of open standards in making a more powerful discovery service work; these include NCIP (to automate transactions between a resource sharing system like NRE/VDX and an ILS) and OpenURL, to support linkages from the discovery system to online resources such as e-journals.