OCLC PICA and OCLC have been behind two new important standards initiatives in the context of improving discovery and delivery.
A working group of ISO (ISO TC46 SC4 WG10), convened by Janifer Gatenby has produced a new Holdings Schema (ISO 20775). A draft is currently being voted. All going well, the standard should be approved by the end of 2007. This standard differs from many other holdings standards in that it is primarily designed to be used in search responses rather than for reporting purposes. As a response schema, it includes relatively static and dynamic information in combination. The dynamic information comprises availability and policy information that may differ depending on the requester and also usage history. It covers all holdings, physical and electronic. Another important feature of the schema is that it includes a summary section for a group of “interchangeable copies” that can be readily parsed and displayed indicating availability and policy (e.g. terms of delivery). The summary is flexible enough to cover multiple definitions of “interchangeability” depending on user needs, e.g. multiple copies (physical and digital) of a book or article, multiple copies of various different editions of a work, and multiple copies of different works in a result set.
The standard has been long awaited. The first attempt at a holdings schema that included item availability was the Z39.50 OPAC schema. The Z39.50 holdings schema was an attempt to supersede this OPAC schema but it was complicated, little understood and very sparsely implemented as a consequence. In 2004, ISO formed a working group to create a holdings schema, overcoming the limitations of the Z39.50 OPAC and Holdings Schema. After a promising start the group lapsed but was re-formed in 2006, working electronically until a full working draft was available for discussion. The group has met twice since in Washington in November 2006 and Santiago de Compostela, Spain in May 2007. It consists of members from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Slovenia, United Kingdom and the U.S.A. An XML version of the schema is available for testing purposes.
The OpenURL Request Transfer Message (RTM) is currently being assessed by the OpenURL Maintenance Agency. It will be an important piece in the international discovery / delivery chain. It will be used to direct requests for loan, copy, access to lookup or digitization of an item from a discovery system, notably OCLC’s worldcat.org site. It is intended to be used for directing requests to Resource Delivery Systems and / or Electronic Resolver Systems.
Resource discovery is nowadays dispersed as metadata about resources is available in multiple locations: it is no longer just to be found in a library’s OPAC, but also in internet search engines such as Google Scholar and Yahoo, collective repositories and emerging freely accessible public interfaces of union catalogues, such as WorldCat, COPAC, Danbib, GBV, Libraries Australia, SUDOC, TEL, just to name a few. Increasingly, all data is not held in any one place; resource description is more widely dispersed than detailed holdings information and is often held remotely in web pages and services that do not have accompanying supply mechanisms. Therefore there is a need for a request to be transferred from one system to another that can go about resolving the request and facilitating delivery or access.
The Request Transfer Message is an OpenURL Community Profile that is designed to convey whatever known information there is about the requester, the wanted item and requested service that can be transferred. The diagram below illustrates the role of the Request Transfer Message in the discovery to delivery process.
When a user clicks a link or button on an HTML page, information about a wanted resource, the user and the service requested are transported to a Resource Delivery System (for example a online linking resolver or a library resource sharing system). The transportation message is based on HTTP(S) POST and is referred to as “an OpenURL”. The purpose of the transportation is to relay the request to a service provider that will serve the particular user in the way he requests. The descriptions of the resource, user and requested service are conveyed. Of particular note the new ISO Holdings Schema is included within the “requested service” section to indicate possible suppliers.
