April 22-23, 2013 (In Person Meeting)
NCIP Standing Committee Minutes April 22 – 23, 2013 Hosted by OCLC in Dublin, OH Attended: Mike Dicus (Ex Libris), Tony O’Brien (OCLC), Juli Marsh (TLC), Rob Gray (Polaris), Peter Collins (Univ. of Penn.), Kevin Stewart (Relais), John Bodfish (OCLC), John Barr (Polaris), Lori Ayre (Galecia Group).
Kelli Benitez (TLC) and Nettie Lagace (NISO) joined the meeting by telephone during discussion of specific topics during the first day.
Monday, April 22, 2013 Implementer’s Updates
John Bodfish – working on an OPAC NCIP Application Proflie, piloting with EBSCO, for EDS to interop with WMS libraries’ circulation system (LookupUser, RequestItem, UpdateRequestItem, CancelRequestItem and RenewItem). Working on Navigator v2 interops with Ex Libris Alma and v1 interops with Polaris (under OCLC’s Circ/ILL Application Profiles). Internally developing an ILL Application Profile for a patron UI to submit requests to WorldShare ILL.
Rob Gray – Active development with Relais and OCLC. Implementation in Maryland going well, bug with institutional patron checking out items at other libraries, due to same institutional patron desiring same item, so it appears as a duplicate request. Unable to determine when there are duplicate requests. INNReach in Denver – not much change, hoping for a modification to item barcode shows up late in process so Polaris is not getting the item barcode until it shows up at the door. Displays to patron are not satisfactory to library, Polaris is looking for a way to resolve. InnReach’s five character agency code causing issues, putting pressure on III.
Peter Collins – Borrow Direct and E-ZBorrow moving Voyager libraries to NCIP. Borrow Direct libraries are still using SIP, working to migrate them all to NCIP over the next year. Kuali OLE in active development with NCIP. Plan to work with NCIP Toolkit for Kuali OLE interface dev.
Juli Marsh – Actively developing with OCLC in Texas. Completed with OCLC in Colorado, went very well. MelCAT project stalled again, awaiting more from MCLS. Active implementations with AutoGraphics in New Jersey and Mississippi are going well. Issue arose with Relais and EZBorrow that we are investigating. MARINA in Maryland is experiencing an issue with arrived items associated with incorrect borrower barcodes, awaiting reply from Relais as they are troubleshooting.
Kevin Stewart – EZ Borrow and Borrow Direct with Marina, working through some issues with Polaris implementations, need earlier Lookup message with OCLC.
Tony O’Brien – WorldCat RS and WorldShare ILL are both using NCIP. Less involved in NCIP development at this time.
Mike Dicus – Relais and Alma in active development. New Alma implementations are using NCIP v.2. Also working with AutoGraphics to develop integration between AG’s SHAREit and Ex Libris’ Aleph, Voyager and Alma systems.
Lori Ayre – Attending to learn and represent library’s interests. Interested in exploring if Library Communication Framework (LCF) can be merged with NCIP or can be useful in some way. Wants to extend functionality for RFID and current protocols don’t allow for this (especially SIP).
SC Membership Review / Maintenance Agency
Inactive Members
Jeff Fleming (Duke Univ) is working on adding NCIP support to Kuali OLE - adding NCIP - issue with Lookup Item Set Service, item info in holding set. Documentation says "item info element occurs zero or more times" but the schema actually supports "one or more times."
Action Item: Page 58 of documentation needs to be corrected. This applies to version 2.02. Filename of document is "z39-83-1-2012_NCIP.pdf"
· John Bodfish will notify Jeff.
· Juli will contact Nettie to get master copy of documentation and make this document correction.
John Bodfish proposal to change schema:
In the Bibliographic description element, there is an Item ID and a Record ID and ohn reports that the distinction between them is subtle.” (I.e., I don’t find it confusing, but I was there when the distinction was birthed.) The following two sentences should read “Record ID is inherently associated with an institution – it’s an identifier of that institution’s record, and is repeatable. Item ID is an identifier of the bibliographic item (not a record), e.g. ISBN, DOI, Government Document Number, ISSN, etc. Record ID seems to be associated with an institution and is repeatable. Item ID is used for ISBN, DOI, Government Document Number, ISSN, etc. This number is not repeatable and John would like to make it repeatable. Tony reports that this field is not referenced elsewhere in the schema for reference (it is strictly payload) so sees no reason it couldn't be made repeatable. Discussion followed and there were no objections. John will post to the list and write up proposal for SC consideration and decision at a future meeting.
John Bodfish - WMS has suspension dates for holds but this isn't supported in NCIP. Discussion about adding one or more fields to support. Earliest Date Needed, Needed Before Date already exist so could add dates in between there to allow for a suspension period. Polaris manages this as date ranges. TLC supports suspension date as a cutoff date. John will write support for two different approaches (date ranges versus actual suspension date). Maybe new fields should be "Suspend Until" or "Suspend from Now until...". Would apply to Request Item and Update Item messages. Perhaps define an Optional start date and optional stop date and one or both of the fields would be required. Arose from Ebsco Discovery Service - Worldcat Local use case
LCF Discussion
LCF built use cases, defined data elements to support RFID functions - many of which can't currently be done with just SIP2. Some RFID vendors use SIP2 and some do completely customized interfaces to enhance functionality. Lori would like to find a way forward with a standard so as to reduce the number of customized interfaces.
Discussion held about relationship between SIP, NCIP and LCF. Every service in SIP2 can be implemented in NCIP. SIP3 does some things that NCIP2 does not currently support. Is batch processing really important? Is LCF building something that already exists? Perhaps most of this can be implemented in NCIP. Discussion of new use cases made possible by RFID technology
What the NCIP SC group might be able to do:
· Help LCF map what they've done to existing NCIP messages?
· What messages in NCIP could support their use cases - low hanging fruit
John Bodfish is willing to spend some time reviewing LCF to see how they map to NCIP; Tony and Kevin will also contribute some time. Lori will talk to an RFID vendor and the LCF folks to see how they feel about moving forward cooperatively with the NCIP SC group.
TC46 -WG14 ILL
John Bodfish - wish it was an implementation of NCIP but it isn't so at the very least would like to find a way to get NCIP2 representation on that group to ensure there's some consistency (naming conventions, technology used)
Discussion of reciprocal borrowing versus ILL versus resource-sharing, history of ISO ILL, ILDS and how ISO decided this new protocol was needed. Mark Needleman is one of the US representatives. Clare MacKeigan and Ed Davidson are also working on it (Kevin). With technology available today, many transactions could be handled as "resource-sharing/circ" transactions but reinvigorated ILL protocol may cause more transactions to be handled as intensively manual ILL transactions when there is no reason it need be (Tony).
There is a very strong interest in ensuring consistency in the schemas across all resource-sharing related protocols. This group might even be able to change some element names in NCIP to match their schema. Some of the members of this group are on that new ILL group so will advocate for an aligned solution (use similar service names, element names and structure of the elements as much as possible). Move toward convergence if possible. Would they be willing to use same names and only veer off when they can justify it, at which point NCIP name may need to be changed? NCIP date-time form is one example of something that might need to be changed (e.g. to allow for date-only fields).
Membership Discussion with Nettie
Quorum - do we have one and if so what is it?
· NISO General Procedures (Section 2.3 Conduct of Committee Members). Members must attend meetings on a regular basis. Failure to attend 3 consecutive meetings, disruptive behavior, and failing to do assignments is ground for dismissal.
· NCIP.info also says quorum is 2/3 (needed to vote on anything) and then vote must get 50% +1 to win.
· Chair may ask D2D Committee to dismiss members. Chair can get help from NISO staff.
Mike will look over list and identify those organizations that have not been participating (and making it impossible to get a quorum) that should be contacted. Nettie will follow-up.
In terms of Maintenance Agency, can we distribute responsibilities among SC members? Yes. And maybe we should dissolve the Maintenance Agency. This would require a vote, and thus we need to have a quorum of voting members.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 NEW ISO ILL STANDARD
ISO ILL open to aligning new ILL standard with NCIP, per email from Clare MacKeigan. Discussion about what follow-up is needed. Would be useful for them to have NCIP's
· Data element names
· Schema
· Web services
· XML structures
Since they are on fast track (releasing something in June, 2013), we should stay on top of this to ensure they follow through on this. Mike will reach out to them.
Aligning messages and data structures could potentially reduce work required for ILS vendors to support this new interface. If protocols are aligned closely enough, the NCIP Toolkit could be leveraged to support development.
Discussion about need for coordination of data elements across all protocols and role of this Standing Committee, NISO, and Discovery / Delivery Topic Committee
Could we talk to Discovery to Delivery TC (our parent group) and tell them we would like them to coordinate a harmonization of data structures, data elements, etc. that all these protocols use because there is so much overlap. Step one could be to effectively work with this new ISO ILL standard.
Possible role for Lori - communicate with libraries that ILS procurements should require support for specific NCIP Application Profiles. Also work with libraries to bring information to this group about what other applications profiles are needed (e.g. acquisitions, inventory, ILL to ILS, ILS to ILS, and ILS to Discovery. (John says we should focus first on Circ-ILL and Discovery Interface).
SIP3 Working Group Update
SIP is for communication within an organization. NCIP is for communications between organizations.” I think you should delete the next sentence (“NCIP effectively handles anonymously passing information to another entity (e.g. patron barcode number to another library or OCLC is replaced in NCIP but not in SIP). “ as it is stated better in the next few sentences. The sentence “NCIP actually creates a new identifier for the patron before passing it to another agency.” should read “NCIP associates a namespace (the AgencyId) with the identifier, which allows mapping the internal identifier to a unique identifier for each external agency. NCIP effectively handles anonymously passing information to another entity (e.g. patron barcode number to another library or OCLC is replaced in NCIP but not in SIP). SIP2 sends unique patron identifier as unencrypted data across the LAN (some use ssh to add a level of protection but it is still the actual barcode). SIP3 will support HTTPS in the transport to address the encryption issue but it is still the actual barcode number. NCIP actually creates a new identifier for the patron before passing it to another agency. HTTPS uses encryption and potentially other additional security steps (e.g. certificate exchange to verify server identities).
Some highlights of SIP3
SCOPE OF NCIP
Had talked about removing self-service applications from this group’s charge, but this is backwards thinking. OCLC will soon pilot an NCIP-based service for patron self-service (the one with EBSCO), and will soon publish their Application Profile for it.
Who should do what?
Vendors should provide open API. Vendors should support NCIP2 and expand it as needed. With NCIP toolkit, it is fairly straightforward to use the ILS vendor's API to send NCIP messages.
Tony presentation on XSD Element substitution
Provides a fallback solution for allowing for different data element names to the NCIP data element names. Build schema and then build aliases into the schema. Allows for naming elements and services that are identical. Similar? No. Must be identical.
NCIP is very flexible and has services with lots of alternatives for how to use it, e.g. REQUEST ITEM can do lots or little.
Should there be fewer messages in core NCIP? No, the answer is to talk about NCIP Application Profiles instead of "NCIP" in terms of conformance and as a way for people to get involved in starting to support NCIP. It starts with figuring out which Application Profile applies to you (as a developer).
User Education and Marketing of NCIP
Group had a discussion about how we can educate libraries on NCIP. Some of the suggestions were to make the NCIP.info site more layman friendly:
Create a table that lists the application profiles and the vendors with dots to identify who supports what. Make is easy for people to realize their options when choosing what protocol to implement.
Wrap Up – next meeting dates/location, etc. Where and when next meeting: Peter said he would explore hosting at the University of Pennsylvania. Mike also volunteered to host at Ex Libris in Chicago, and Lori said she would see if she could host the meeting in California. The group discussed holding the next meeting in October 2013; no set dates yet.
Action Items:
Kelli Benitez (TLC) and Nettie Lagace (NISO) joined the meeting by telephone during discussion of specific topics during the first day.
Monday, April 22, 2013 Implementer’s Updates
John Bodfish – working on an OPAC NCIP Application Proflie, piloting with EBSCO, for EDS to interop with WMS libraries’ circulation system (LookupUser, RequestItem, UpdateRequestItem, CancelRequestItem and RenewItem). Working on Navigator v2 interops with Ex Libris Alma and v1 interops with Polaris (under OCLC’s Circ/ILL Application Profiles). Internally developing an ILL Application Profile for a patron UI to submit requests to WorldShare ILL.
Rob Gray – Active development with Relais and OCLC. Implementation in Maryland going well, bug with institutional patron checking out items at other libraries, due to same institutional patron desiring same item, so it appears as a duplicate request. Unable to determine when there are duplicate requests. INNReach in Denver – not much change, hoping for a modification to item barcode shows up late in process so Polaris is not getting the item barcode until it shows up at the door. Displays to patron are not satisfactory to library, Polaris is looking for a way to resolve. InnReach’s five character agency code causing issues, putting pressure on III.
Peter Collins – Borrow Direct and E-ZBorrow moving Voyager libraries to NCIP. Borrow Direct libraries are still using SIP, working to migrate them all to NCIP over the next year. Kuali OLE in active development with NCIP. Plan to work with NCIP Toolkit for Kuali OLE interface dev.
Juli Marsh – Actively developing with OCLC in Texas. Completed with OCLC in Colorado, went very well. MelCAT project stalled again, awaiting more from MCLS. Active implementations with AutoGraphics in New Jersey and Mississippi are going well. Issue arose with Relais and EZBorrow that we are investigating. MARINA in Maryland is experiencing an issue with arrived items associated with incorrect borrower barcodes, awaiting reply from Relais as they are troubleshooting.
Kevin Stewart – EZ Borrow and Borrow Direct with Marina, working through some issues with Polaris implementations, need earlier Lookup message with OCLC.
Tony O’Brien – WorldCat RS and WorldShare ILL are both using NCIP. Less involved in NCIP development at this time.
Mike Dicus – Relais and Alma in active development. New Alma implementations are using NCIP v.2. Also working with AutoGraphics to develop integration between AG’s SHAREit and Ex Libris’ Aleph, Voyager and Alma systems.
Lori Ayre – Attending to learn and represent library’s interests. Interested in exploring if Library Communication Framework (LCF) can be merged with NCIP or can be useful in some way. Wants to extend functionality for RFID and current protocols don’t allow for this (especially SIP).
SC Membership Review / Maintenance Agency
Inactive Members
- Unable to get a quorum with so many inactive members on the active roll
- Mike Dicus will work with Nettie to contact members who have not attended any of the last three meetings. (See notes below from conversation with Nettie)
- Rob Walsh with Envisionware has stepped down as Maintenance Agency Role. This leaves the spot open. Juli Marsh suggested we distribute the responsibilities among members. The main responsibilities are:
- Maintaining the Documentation – Juli Marsh volunteered to maintain.
- Maintaining the NCIP.Info site – Rob Gray will talk with Rob Walsh about this
- Schema maintenance – Tony O’Brien will continue with support from Kevin Stewart
- Meeting minutes – Rotate this responsibility among all members
Jeff Fleming (Duke Univ) is working on adding NCIP support to Kuali OLE - adding NCIP - issue with Lookup Item Set Service, item info in holding set. Documentation says "item info element occurs zero or more times" but the schema actually supports "one or more times."
Action Item: Page 58 of documentation needs to be corrected. This applies to version 2.02. Filename of document is "z39-83-1-2012_NCIP.pdf"
· John Bodfish will notify Jeff.
· Juli will contact Nettie to get master copy of documentation and make this document correction.
John Bodfish proposal to change schema:
In the Bibliographic description element, there is an Item ID and a Record ID and ohn reports that the distinction between them is subtle.” (I.e., I don’t find it confusing, but I was there when the distinction was birthed.) The following two sentences should read “Record ID is inherently associated with an institution – it’s an identifier of that institution’s record, and is repeatable. Item ID is an identifier of the bibliographic item (not a record), e.g. ISBN, DOI, Government Document Number, ISSN, etc. Record ID seems to be associated with an institution and is repeatable. Item ID is used for ISBN, DOI, Government Document Number, ISSN, etc. This number is not repeatable and John would like to make it repeatable. Tony reports that this field is not referenced elsewhere in the schema for reference (it is strictly payload) so sees no reason it couldn't be made repeatable. Discussion followed and there were no objections. John will post to the list and write up proposal for SC consideration and decision at a future meeting.
John Bodfish - WMS has suspension dates for holds but this isn't supported in NCIP. Discussion about adding one or more fields to support. Earliest Date Needed, Needed Before Date already exist so could add dates in between there to allow for a suspension period. Polaris manages this as date ranges. TLC supports suspension date as a cutoff date. John will write support for two different approaches (date ranges versus actual suspension date). Maybe new fields should be "Suspend Until" or "Suspend from Now until...". Would apply to Request Item and Update Item messages. Perhaps define an Optional start date and optional stop date and one or both of the fields would be required. Arose from Ebsco Discovery Service - Worldcat Local use case
LCF Discussion
LCF built use cases, defined data elements to support RFID functions - many of which can't currently be done with just SIP2. Some RFID vendors use SIP2 and some do completely customized interfaces to enhance functionality. Lori would like to find a way forward with a standard so as to reduce the number of customized interfaces.
Discussion held about relationship between SIP, NCIP and LCF. Every service in SIP2 can be implemented in NCIP. SIP3 does some things that NCIP2 does not currently support. Is batch processing really important? Is LCF building something that already exists? Perhaps most of this can be implemented in NCIP. Discussion of new use cases made possible by RFID technology
What the NCIP SC group might be able to do:
· Help LCF map what they've done to existing NCIP messages?
· What messages in NCIP could support their use cases - low hanging fruit
John Bodfish is willing to spend some time reviewing LCF to see how they map to NCIP; Tony and Kevin will also contribute some time. Lori will talk to an RFID vendor and the LCF folks to see how they feel about moving forward cooperatively with the NCIP SC group.
TC46 -WG14 ILL
John Bodfish - wish it was an implementation of NCIP but it isn't so at the very least would like to find a way to get NCIP2 representation on that group to ensure there's some consistency (naming conventions, technology used)
Discussion of reciprocal borrowing versus ILL versus resource-sharing, history of ISO ILL, ILDS and how ISO decided this new protocol was needed. Mark Needleman is one of the US representatives. Clare MacKeigan and Ed Davidson are also working on it (Kevin). With technology available today, many transactions could be handled as "resource-sharing/circ" transactions but reinvigorated ILL protocol may cause more transactions to be handled as intensively manual ILL transactions when there is no reason it need be (Tony).
There is a very strong interest in ensuring consistency in the schemas across all resource-sharing related protocols. This group might even be able to change some element names in NCIP to match their schema. Some of the members of this group are on that new ILL group so will advocate for an aligned solution (use similar service names, element names and structure of the elements as much as possible). Move toward convergence if possible. Would they be willing to use same names and only veer off when they can justify it, at which point NCIP name may need to be changed? NCIP date-time form is one example of something that might need to be changed (e.g. to allow for date-only fields).
Membership Discussion with Nettie
Quorum - do we have one and if so what is it?
· NISO General Procedures (Section 2.3 Conduct of Committee Members). Members must attend meetings on a regular basis. Failure to attend 3 consecutive meetings, disruptive behavior, and failing to do assignments is ground for dismissal.
· NCIP.info also says quorum is 2/3 (needed to vote on anything) and then vote must get 50% +1 to win.
· Chair may ask D2D Committee to dismiss members. Chair can get help from NISO staff.
Mike will look over list and identify those organizations that have not been participating (and making it impossible to get a quorum) that should be contacted. Nettie will follow-up.
In terms of Maintenance Agency, can we distribute responsibilities among SC members? Yes. And maybe we should dissolve the Maintenance Agency. This would require a vote, and thus we need to have a quorum of voting members.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 NEW ISO ILL STANDARD
ISO ILL open to aligning new ILL standard with NCIP, per email from Clare MacKeigan. Discussion about what follow-up is needed. Would be useful for them to have NCIP's
· Data element names
· Schema
· Web services
· XML structures
Since they are on fast track (releasing something in June, 2013), we should stay on top of this to ensure they follow through on this. Mike will reach out to them.
Aligning messages and data structures could potentially reduce work required for ILS vendors to support this new interface. If protocols are aligned closely enough, the NCIP Toolkit could be leveraged to support development.
Discussion about need for coordination of data elements across all protocols and role of this Standing Committee, NISO, and Discovery / Delivery Topic Committee
Could we talk to Discovery to Delivery TC (our parent group) and tell them we would like them to coordinate a harmonization of data structures, data elements, etc. that all these protocols use because there is so much overlap. Step one could be to effectively work with this new ISO ILL standard.
Possible role for Lori - communicate with libraries that ILS procurements should require support for specific NCIP Application Profiles. Also work with libraries to bring information to this group about what other applications profiles are needed (e.g. acquisitions, inventory, ILL to ILS, ILS to ILS, and ILS to Discovery. (John says we should focus first on Circ-ILL and Discovery Interface).
SIP3 Working Group Update
SIP is for communication within an organization. NCIP is for communications between organizations.” I think you should delete the next sentence (“NCIP effectively handles anonymously passing information to another entity (e.g. patron barcode number to another library or OCLC is replaced in NCIP but not in SIP). “ as it is stated better in the next few sentences. The sentence “NCIP actually creates a new identifier for the patron before passing it to another agency.” should read “NCIP associates a namespace (the AgencyId) with the identifier, which allows mapping the internal identifier to a unique identifier for each external agency. NCIP effectively handles anonymously passing information to another entity (e.g. patron barcode number to another library or OCLC is replaced in NCIP but not in SIP). SIP2 sends unique patron identifier as unencrypted data across the LAN (some use ssh to add a level of protection but it is still the actual barcode). SIP3 will support HTTPS in the transport to address the encryption issue but it is still the actual barcode number. NCIP actually creates a new identifier for the patron before passing it to another agency. HTTPS uses encryption and potentially other additional security steps (e.g. certificate exchange to verify server identities).
Some highlights of SIP3
- HTTPS transport of messages (Perl script that would allow a library using SIP2 to use HTTPS as transport (Biblionix contributed it)).
- Better support for SMS for notices
- Other incorporations of extensions into standard
- Moving to SIP3 will be easier for many libraries than moving to NCIP
SCOPE OF NCIP
Had talked about removing self-service applications from this group’s charge, but this is backwards thinking. OCLC will soon pilot an NCIP-based service for patron self-service (the one with EBSCO), and will soon publish their Application Profile for it.
Who should do what?
Vendors should provide open API. Vendors should support NCIP2 and expand it as needed. With NCIP toolkit, it is fairly straightforward to use the ILS vendor's API to send NCIP messages.
Tony presentation on XSD Element substitution
Provides a fallback solution for allowing for different data element names to the NCIP data element names. Build schema and then build aliases into the schema. Allows for naming elements and services that are identical. Similar? No. Must be identical.
NCIP is very flexible and has services with lots of alternatives for how to use it, e.g. REQUEST ITEM can do lots or little.
Should there be fewer messages in core NCIP? No, the answer is to talk about NCIP Application Profiles instead of "NCIP" in terms of conformance and as a way for people to get involved in starting to support NCIP. It starts with figuring out which Application Profile applies to you (as a developer).
User Education and Marketing of NCIP
Group had a discussion about how we can educate libraries on NCIP. Some of the suggestions were to make the NCIP.info site more layman friendly:
- Create a place on the site for success stories
- Post presentations that members of the group give at other conferences, etc.
- Create a blog where we could post once a month, on a rotation
- In general make it a little less technical, and keep it up to date
Create a table that lists the application profiles and the vendors with dots to identify who supports what. Make is easy for people to realize their options when choosing what protocol to implement.
Wrap Up – next meeting dates/location, etc. Where and when next meeting: Peter said he would explore hosting at the University of Pennsylvania. Mike also volunteered to host at Ex Libris in Chicago, and Lori said she would see if she could host the meeting in California. The group discussed holding the next meeting in October 2013; no set dates yet.
Action Items:
- Lori to set up meeting with John Bodfish and Bibliotheca
- Lori to work with Tony to define "problems we are going to solve"
- Mike to send a list of people who should receive a communication from Nettie re: membership to the group.
- Juli will review the NCIP.info site for errors to be corrected and potential places for improvement.
- Will work with Rob Gray to implement these.
- Juli to investigate if there is a benefit in moving to Wordpress from Weebly? Both are free sites we could leverage.
- Rob to contact Rob Walsh re: NCIP.Info maintenance info
- Juli will contact Nettie and Rob Walsh to get master copy of documentation for maintenance. Then make the change noted above.
- Mike to reach out to ISO ILL group