In fact, the sales rep told me as much last week when they were pitching
the RSS product.



---
David Cloutman <[log in to unmask]>
Electronic Services Librarian
Marin County Free Library

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 10:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Life after Expect


What I've heard is that there is indeed a set of APIs for III, which
they in fact _used_ to sell as an add-on product, but currently access
to the APIs are not available to customers at any price.

Jonathan

Cloutman, David wrote:
> It is very clear to me, from trying to integrate into our III systems,
> is that their ILS is desperately in need of being reworked into more
of
> an SOA model. The best that they can currently do for library
developers
> is sell us an RSS product, which I think probably falls short of what
we
> actually need. What we need is a well documented, functional,
> standards-based web service that could be used to hook into other
> applications. It seems to me that the best that many of us can do with
> the III product in terms of automated integration is to grab data
> through some sort of screen scraping.
>
> The fact that a product like Encore works at all, to me indicates that
> there must be some sort of programmatic hooks in the catalog that we
as
> customers could leverage for our own purposes, but I have not been
able
> to find any documentation of these.
>
> Of course, empowering developers, or their customers in general, is
not
> in the III business model, so I don't think we can expect much from
> them.
>
>
>
> ---
> David Cloutman <[log in to unmask]>
> Electronic Services Librarian
> Marin County Free Library
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of
> Eric Lease Morgan
> Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 5:39 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Life after Expect
>
>
> On May 15, 2008, at 8:32 AM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:
>
>
>> Just as the hot dog cookers and other one trick wonders in the
kitchen
>> are of very limited use, special purpose tools that attempt to define
>> your problem and solution are not nearly useful as generic ones in an
>> ILS context. I am still hoping that vendors will recognize that true
>> interoperability is a feature that increases the value of the ILS
more
>> than just about anything else.
>>
>
>
> Well said. The vendor who provides a suit of tools that can
> interoperate with any number of other standards-based tools is as
> vendor to establish close relationships with.
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
> Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame
>
> (574) 631-8604
>
> Email Disclaimer:
http://www.co.marin.ca.us/nav/misc/EmailDisclaimer.cfm
>
>

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu