Standards and the OPAC/ILS

If you’ve followed this blog, my blog or Casey’s blog then you’ve probably seen the various problems we’ve ran into regarding the formats some ILS’s use, the lack of a good API, etc. I’ll avoid discussing vendor lock-in and go over some of the recent discussions on standards instead.

Not far back there was an article in the Library Journal proposing a standards body for libraries. As an outsider it seems to me that currently many of the “standards” (formats) come from Library of Congress (MARC,etc) and various interpretations at OCLC. There are probably many other scattered ideas from various organizations, I only see what pops up on blogs. As an outsider it also seemed that many of these formats seem overly complex for some work and are hindered by legacy/other issues. To me a standards organization that could work on APIs and other simpler formats for ILS/data interoperability would be a boon. This is not to say the current formats don’t have their place but there is plenty of work that could be done in some areas.

I let this slide though as I’m also an outsider when it comes to bib/catalog type things and so do not know the ins and outs of the data set. However, I’ve seen an increase in posts by those working with the data stating similar ideas and problems and it’s brought up some interesting discussion.

Recently at darcusblog there was a discussion on simple vs complex in the library data sets. To quote:

Last week at the Access 2005 conference, I told a room full of mostly library people that their XML standards (I was talking about MODS and MADS in particular) are needlessly complex, inflexible, and awkward; that they were not hacker-friendly…

The post goes on to discuss the differences between XML and RDF as well as discussing the difficulties of capturing metadata in general. A good read. Soon after I read this post something came up in the XML4Lib discussion list also regarding comments at Access 2005 and the problems with data and standards. Some choice quotes from a reply/rant by Alexander Johannesen:

… all these models we throw up on a monthly basis (and heck, I’ll include FRBR here, too)
needs some underlying technology to make it work, but so far no one has seemed to give this much thought, and the result is bucketloads of different XML schemas.

And later (same post):

It’s well and fine that you *can* do something in the current clunky ways, but the manner in which this has been done is countering the library modus operandis; in the best interest of the patrons! Currently it is expensive, slow, untidy, at times random, slow, inflexible, and more! In any other industry this wouldn’t be tolerated, so why are we? Why is Z39.50 still popping up as a requirement? Is it because it is better than Webservices (with or without SOAP, REST or otherwise), or because of legacy, or because ‘we designed it, and heck, we’ll use it!’ Depending on who you ask and when you ask it, the answers are different, and far too often it falls towards the latter.

I recommend reading the whole thread as it brings up many of the walls I’ve run into and states it with less obscenities than I would. I think I could write a novel on how many obstacles I’ve ran into and how many times I just wanted to start from scratch. This wouldn’t solve anything, of course, as I’d just be adding another format to the heap.

So what do you think? Do we need more centralized standards where more people from various backgrounds can take part? Is MARC and MARC XML really ok to be THE format for an ILS? Do we need something new for a webservice API? Loss-less data export is nice but do we need something simpler for other tasks? Should we use outside standards such as RSS/ATOM with extensions?

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