I notice that John Blyberg has implemented access to our Audience Level Web Service in PatRest:
I’ve updated AADL’s PatREST interface to reflect an addition I’ve made to the PatREST specification (now 1.3). This addition takes advantage of OCLC’s Audience Level indicator. OCLC makes this information available via an XML web service.
I have the audience level greasemonkey scripts installed, and I see a suggested audience level whenever I look at something in Worldcat.org or Amazon. I find it useful, one hint among others, as I have suggested before, about the level of interest of the book. My colleagues have been conducting some evaluation of the Audience Level indicator and they will have some results later in the year.
PatRest is an example of what I have been calling an ILS Service Layer, a programmatic way of accessing ILS functionality. The need for an agreed service layer is growing. One important case is the developing interest in connecting a library discovery front end to an inventory management backend (see for example, Worldcat.org, the NCSU Catalog, Ex-Libris’s Primo product, Libraries Australia, etc). This is required to determine availability etc. Of course, this is one example of mixing ILS functionality into another application.
Via Eric Childress.
