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NCIP on the Move

David Dorman - Technically Speaking
Published in: American Libraries, March 2003

The promise of seamless interlibrary loan and circulation transactions involving multiple library systems is moving closer to reality with progress in NCIP deployment. NCIP (NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol) is a successor to, and a more generalized version of, the 3M Standard Interchange Protocols (SIP and its successor SIP2), which were developed by 3M for its self-checkout stations.

Last spring, TLC and Ameritech (now Dynix) demonstrated proof-of-concept of the NCIP tool kits they had developed by exchanging NCIP messages between their two systems. Recently Dynix announced that it had implemented the request half of the "broker controlled" direct consortial NCIP profile in its Universal Resource Sharing Application (URSA) ILL system. This is one of four direct consortial profiles defined by the NCIP development committee.

The URSA implementation is in the final stages of testing with the Ex Libris Aleph 500 system. The Boston Library Consortium, which uses URSA to coordinate interlibrary loan among multiple ILS systems and vendors, includes Boston College, which uses the Aleph 500 system and which is doing the testing. Aleph 500 is the first ILS to support the response half of the "broker controlled" NCIP profile in a general release version, but others are on the way. As of mid-April, Dynix URSA developers were testing the profile with middleware developed by Sirsi for its Unicorn system, and Dynix itself has plans to make its Horizon system fully compliant with the response half of the profile by the end of the year.

In the meantime, OCLC has volunteered to be the maintenance agency for the standard, and it has implemented several authentication-related NCIP request messages to control access to the FirstSearch service; but so far no ILS vendors have tested the relevant NCIP response messages with OCLC to confirm interoperability. OCLC also has plans to implement a substantial portion of the request half of the "broker controlled" direct consortial profile in its FirstSearch service.