Janifer Gatenby
Strategic Research, OCLC PICA

Janifer is a specialist in standards and specification and development of library management systems and their implementation. At OCLC PICA, Janifer's role currently includes identification of trends and business opportunities, interoperation and research liaison with OCLC and standards representation. She has also been involved with the implementation of the national union catalogue of Australia. She is the principal editor of ISO 20775 (Holdings Schema), OpenURL Request Transfer Message, ISO 8459 (Data elements), the Union Catalogue profile and SRU update. She is a contributor to the SRU standard, the Bath profile, Z39.50 Holdings schema, FRBR continuing resources, ISO 2146 (Registries for libraries and related institutions) and the Re-thinking Resource Sharing initiative and the ELAG working Group on Resource Sharing.

Abstract

Resource discovery is nowadays dispersed as metadata about resources is available in multiple locations: it is no longer just to be found in a library’s OPAC, but also in internet search engines such as Google Scholar and Yahoo, collective repositories and emerging freely accessible public interfaces of union catalogues, such as WorldCat, Libraries Australia, SUDOC, TEL, GBV, Danbib just to name a few. Increasingly, all data is not held in any one place; resource description is more widely dispersed than detailed holdings information and is often held remotely in web pages and services that do not have accompanying supply mechanisms. Therefore there is a need for a request to be transferred from one system to another that can go about resolving the request and facilitating delivery or access.

This paper discusses the new Request Transfer Message that is expressed as a set of OpenURL schemas. The Request Transfer Message is designed to convey whatever known information there is about the requester, the wanted item and requested service that can be transferred to a delivery system. It also discusses the new standard ISO Holdings (ISO 20775) that is used within the Request Transfer Message and the role of this holdings standard along side others.