Ex Libris has been in ongoing conversations with Innovative Interfaces regarding the new INN-Reach proprietary APIs and is committed to continuing its role in the process of integrating with these APIs.
After thorough analysis of the final version of the new INN-Reach proprietary APIs and Alma’s active roadmap plans, the completion of the integration between Alma and the new III INN-Reach is currently planned for 2020. The availability and completion of the integration is dependent on smooth testing and the stability of the new APIs.
This plan is based on the analysis of many different, new and proprietary INN-reach APIs that need to be implemented, including the replacement of an existing records export capability that instead will make use of the new INN-Reach proprietary record-publishing APIs.
Ex Libris believes in and promotes the use of industry standards for greater openness and more efficient ways of integrating systems. We respect III’s decision to take a proprietary API approach; however, this makes the integration effort much greater, given that all of the proprietary circulation APIs of INN-Reach have equivalent standard ISO (10160/10161 or 18626) messages or equivalent standard NCIP messages that are already supported by Alma as well as by other vendors.
In addition, the other INN-Reach proprietary APIs have an equivalent industry-standard record-publishing protocol (OAI-PMH) used by many solutions to publish their records.
The use of industry-standard protocols and interfaces would have minimized the required effort and the vendor-specific development that is currently required. As a comparison, an integration that has been developed for Alma and OCLC Tipasa is based on industry-standard interfaces and has been developed with a minimal development effort. Likewise, support for ISO 18626 is currently in development and is soon to be released.
Ex Libris will continue to provide updates periodically as we move forward with the integration between Alma and the INN-Reach APIs.