Today's libraries are outgrowing their traditional discovery tools. Information about the content available to library users is commonly managed in an Integrated Library System (ILS) that manages acquisition, the catalog, and circulation. The ILS also generally provides a public interface (known as the "OPAC") to the catalog. The integrated functions of the ILS have helped streamline library operations, and the data managed by ILS's is highly valuable information about a library's collections and holdings. In recent years, however, users have grown to expect more. They want to be able to see resources available to them outside the library's traditional holdings, including online databases, resources obtainable from other libraries, and interactive forums. They want more options for finding content relevant to them beyond the traditional author/title/subject search or generic keyword searches. When they do find something of interest, wherever that may be, they want to use the library's services, where appropriate, to obtain it. They want to integrate their library research and discovery with all the other ways they carry on research and education, which often involves a wide variety of applications and online services.

The public interfaces currently provided by most ILS's cannot by themselves meet the demands of users in a world where the availability and sophistication of digital resources and web applications has increased significantly. This does not simply reflect badly designed interfaces; it reflects the fact that users now need a wider variety of capabilities than any one software package can be expected to provide. At the same time, the bibliographic data and services that the ILS manages are crucial for the effective use of libraries. These trends imply that the ILS needs to become a platform that supports appropriate interfaces for discovery applications living on top of it, instead of trying to do everything for the user on its own.

At present, a number of ILS vendors provide proprietary methods for accessing their underlying data stores. These range from proprietary command-line API tools accessible only to trained users to SQL querying on the ILS database tables directly. While these methods provide much needed hooks into the ILS, making library resources more widely usable requires a larger, standards-based API. To ensure outward integration, organizations will require that ILS's adopt a more universal method for providing API access to the data store, moving away from traditional library-centric protocols like Z39.50, and moving to a more familiar XML-based web services API model. Such a model will enable developers outside of the library community to more easily access the information stored within the ILS, creating opportunities for greater integration with non-library applications like course management tools.

In the summer of 2007, the Digital Library Federation convened the ILS-DI working group to analyze issues involved in integrating integrated library systems (ILS's) and discovery applications, and to create a technical proposal for accomplishing such integration. "Integration" in this context includes both two-way communications between such systems, and context-sensitive one-way links from one system to the other.

This document is the (DRAFT) report of that group. It gives technical recommendations for integrating the ILS with external discovery applications. This report includes

• A summary of a survey of the needs and discovery applications implemented and desired by libraries in DLF (and other similar libraries).
• A high-level summary of specific abstract functions that discovery applications need to be able to invoke on ILS's and/or their data to support desired discovery applications, as well as outgoing services from ILS software to other applications.
• Recommendations for concrete bindings for these functions (i.e. specific protocols, APIs, data standards, etc.) that can be used with future and/or existing ILS's. Producing a complete concrete binding and reference implementation is beyond the scope of this small, short-term group; but we hope to provide sufficient requirements and details that others can produce appropriate bindings and implementations.
• Practical recommendations to encourage libraries, ILS developers, and discovery application developers to expeditiously integrate discovery systems with the ILS and other sources of bibliographic metadata.

(Next: How we're doing it)