An Interview with Gail Wanner,NCIP-IG Chair

摘要

NCIP, the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (ANSI/NISO Z39S3) was revised in 2008. Gail Wanner was elected on January 28, 2009 to succeed Candy Zemon as the chairperson for the NCIP Implemented Group. Many in the NISO community may know Gail through her work with various standards efforts or through, her position as Resource Sharing Specialist at SirsiDynix. For those who do not know Gail, this is your chance to learn more about her and her ideas for the NCIP standard and the Implementers Group. As the lead of the NCIP Maintenance Agency, which works closely with the Implementers Group, I had the opportunity to interview Gail recently, and I talked with her about standards in general and NCIP in particular. Q Why have you been regularly involved in standards development? I have always believed in the ideal that libraries should be able to work cooperatively to provide information their users want and need. This may be the result of working in public libraries in the Denver area, where there were many libraries and our users were very mobile. Early in my library life I also learned of the practical need for standards. I was involved in projects to provide access to the Denver Public Library catalog and some academic catalogs throughout the metropolitan area. These projects were attempted before Z39.50, NCIP, and many other new standards; although they succeeded in the short-term, maintaining them proved extremely costly. When I went to work for a small company that created an ILL product called URSA, we used proprietary methods to link resource sharing to local circulation systems, but again, it required constant monitoring to keep everything in sync. When a committee was formed to define NCIP, I began my involvement with standards and the more I work with standards, the more strongly I advocate their use from both practical and idealistic perspectives.