NISO Rises from the Ashes

So as I mentioned I’m working on linking blogging and digital reference, and trying to figure out how to pass messages between the two without doing a major re-work on QABuilder. Then it hit me (I’m slow sometimes)…this is what we built NISO AZ to do, and why we integrated it into QABuilder. It should be a simple matter to get questions and answers into QABuilder using NISO AZ.

For those of you late to the game (or those paying attention to much more important games), NISO AZ is a standards committee that is/was developing technical standards to move digital reference questions and answers between digital reference services regardless of platform. The idea was born as QuIP (the Question Interchange Profile) in my dissertation. There was some initial work on developing the standard and it got as far as a draft for comment.

To my knowledge only we implemented it (I think RefTracker did some work). This makes interoperability testing a bit difficult. But the functionality is there…waiting. I think I’ll resurrect the beast.