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== Notes from Open Source Discovery Portal Camp ==
On 6 November 2008, there was a meeting at the Palinet offices in Philadelphia to discuss the future of open source discovery portals. The [[http://vufind.org/ VuFind]] and [[http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/ Blacklight]] projects had already started cooperating by sharing indexing code in the form of [[http://code.google.com/p/solrmarc/ SolrMarc]], and as a community we wanted to explore whether there were other ways we could be cooperating, and what our development priorities should be. We discussed the following topics and some people identified themselves as particularly interested in following up on specific topics and doing further work in a given area. Bess took notes, which are pasted here, but please feel free to expand upon these with your own memories of the conversation.
=== Jangle ===
Andrew started by giving us a brief introduction to [http://www.jangle.org/ Jangle], a standard approach to building a toolset for interacting with the ILS. It was kickstarted by the DLF ILS API set. The idea is to create a standard way of interacting with the ILS. Jangle is the first implementation of this, and is planned as the "reference implementation." It's an open source standard approach, and will give us a lot of flexibility.
Gabe points out that the DLF standard and the Jangle standard aren't the same thing exactly, but people seem to agree it's still a good start at standardization. Andrew asks, how do we contribute the VuFind drivers to Jangle? Is there an NCIP driver for Jangle? [http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/ Xtensible Catalog ] is using NCIP, for example. One problem with this, though, is that many vendors don't implement NCIP.
Ross Singer is the main developer for Jangle, and he wrote an article about it for the latest code4lib journal. Everyone's homework is to go read that article, available [http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/109 here]. Many institutions are hacking their own ILS, it would be more efficient if we all share this code through something like Jangle, which could then be used by VuFind, Blacklight, [http://code.google.com/p/fac-back-opac/ Helios], or any other project that could talk to Jangle.
Eric Morgan: Jangle is a step in the right direction. DLF came up with a list of API features they want, and then Ross came along and said here's a simple RESTful implementation of a lot of that API, based on ATOM publishing protocol. We need a number of agreed upon shapes of URLs that do things like tell me the status of this book, authority information for a person. To what degree do we want to use something like Jangle in vufind? There aren't a lot of choices right now, and this seems like a good project to explore further.