At the Digital Library Federation’s Fall Forum in Philadelphia, NCSU Library’s Tito Sierra, Markus Wust, and Emily Lynema presented their “CatalogWS” which is a web service that runs against a derivative of their library catalog, provided by Endeca, to provide a suite of really nice new-generation library interfaces.
CatalogWS is implemented as a RESTful Web API on top of NCSU’s Endeca catalog index. Requests are processed via HTTP’s GET protocol. Responses as returned in a XML format defined with the RELAX-NG schema, which in turn can be converted via XSLT into widely-consumed formats such as RSS and OpenSearch. The response includes information on search terms, results, and facets.
There are two key services, search and availability. The XML has also been repurposed to provide one of the first and most straightforward mobile library catalog interfaces, MobiLib. This cool app makes use of the style parameter in the web service request, utilizing a couple stylesheets that transform the core XML into simplified XHTML to create output for the interface.
Although MobiLib’s query interface does not presently do significant optimization, it points to a new and very welcome generation of services that will better direct the rich resources of our libraries into the hands of users, wherever they are.