xISBN to become a a production-quality service
In a comment to my previous posting - about how the failure of the xISBN web service, provided by OCLC’s Office of Research was at the beginning of a series of issues that rippled through LibraryThing and LibraryThingThing, which even led to highlighting a defect in the current version of the Firefox web browser. - Eric Hellman gave an insight in to OCLC’s plans for this widely used useful service.
I direct the business unit at OCLC that has been charged with taking the xISBN prototype and developing it into a production-quality service.
Eric also gives an indication of the terms that the service will be made available under:
The current level of xISBN service will remain free; there will be enhanced levels of service and support that we feel confident will deliver excellent value for reasonable subscription fees.
In tune with my posting; If you want to use the service as it is now, it should be free; If you want to depend on a service you would expect enhanced levels of service and support. It remains to be seen what is meant by reasonable subscription fees. As would be expected, Eric doesn’t provide a release date for the new service - in his place I wouldn’t either.
When the production-quality service does become available, it will be a welcome addition the growing set of distributed dependable Library specific Web Services along side the Talis Platform APIs
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, xISBN, LibraryThing, LibraryThingThing, OCLC, Talis, Talis Platform
