Hi,

following up on our discussion about how to extract holdings
information from a III catalog, and following David's generous offer
to share his code, I went ahead and started a sourceforge project:
libxess.

libxess is intended to bridge the gap between "Library 2.0" services
and legacy ILS such as III Millennium and others. See the picture at
http://libxess.sourceforge.net/ It is intended to provide a simple,
yet clean web interface to a set of proxy scripts which in turn handle
the specific access to those legacy systems.

We have an immediate if mundane use for libxess in LibX: we'd like to
show people what their library holds. Although we could have included
this functionality via screen-scraping into the client, we felt for
various reasons that it may be better to keep this as an optional,
server-side service.

Our vision is that if a library installs libxess, then it can benefit
from all services that are "libxess-enabled." - LibX being just one of
them. lnstalling libxess should be a low overhead operation, such as
uploading a few php scripts to a server. Our target audience are not
programmers, they're librarians who may have limited access to their
ILS (*), but who usually have access to a web server and a place to
run php scripts.

I feel that many library-related projects, at least in as much as they
interact with existing ILS, would benefit from such a facility, and,
to my knowledge, there doesn't seem to be such a facility as of know.
For this reason, I'd like to invite interested people to either
contribute or give their input. You could contribute by, for instance,
providing code for your catalog or whichever system you'd like to see
supported. If so, give me your sourceforge account and I'll set you up
with CVS access.

Let me propose to use the sourceforge forum at
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=693773 for
discussions.

A related question is what the exported interface for this service
should be. Right now, there's none. David's script returns MARC-XML.
I'm wondering if this may be an application for unapi (and for me
finally reason to read through its spec ;-). I had also considered
OpenURL v0.1, but as an outsider I really know too little about
library APIs and formats, so I'd be grateful for input here.
Simplicity is paramount.

 - Godmar

(*) Keeping in mind that in some III-based libraries, you have to have
reached a status that's comparable to OT4 just to gain the privilege
to contact the vendor's helpdesk.