Prepare the evolution: Moving towards a service-oriented architecture

BIBSYS has a long tradition in delivering services based on open protocols, as Z39.50, OpenURL and OAI. There is now achange in demands on services, both as producer, but also as consumer of services. BIBSYS started it's "ready to serve" project, in cooperation with Norwegian archive, Library and museum authority, early 2006. The scope of this was to enableservices delivering and converting to MARC21 metadata. The target services would be OAI, SRU, SRW and web services onmetadata conversion. During the initial stages of this project, it become clear that building services strictly on top of the library system wouldn't givethe desired flexibility and demanded content. To be able to satisfy these demands, fundamental structural changes to thesoftware architecture would be necessary. The main focus has been on search, retrieval and metadata representation. The way the new software architecture is designed, it will be very easy both to create fault tolerant and distributed systems. The architectural components should not need to be aware of what kind of messaging, or remoting protocols that can beused. So both SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, AJAX, message queues and other binding methods may be used, and coexist in thesame system. This also enables the use of external services in an incorporated way.