Talis Keystone

The Library Management System (LMS) is a suite of products designed to meet the diverse needs of a library and its users, often in the context of a larger organisation. Talis Keystone provides an integration platform which enables you to integrate your LMS with other systems in the institution such as the student portal, council website or the CRM system. Talis Keystone is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) middleware layer which is deployed into the institution and delivers services to and from the LMS via industry standard Web Services. To learn more about SOA and its benefits, we recommend that you view the short video on Service Oriented Architecture from JISC.

The first integration module we offer is called View My Account. This provides SOAP and REST Web Services for a client application to consume the details of a borrower's account in an integrated application. For example, a student could log into the portal system provided by their university, check their email, see what lectures they have that day and also see a summary of their library account – all without leaving the student portal; except when they decide to click on the single sign-on link and go directly into their OPAC, signed in, into their account! This library account data and the single sign-on link is provided by the Talis Keystone View My Account integration module and is the result of real time interoperability with the SOAP or the REST Web Service.

Toolkit

To enable developers a quick and easy access to Talis Keystone Web Services, we provide various open source toolkits for different platforms. Currently, you can download a toolkit for the Java and the .NET platform for free. The toolkits contain everything you need to rapidly integrate your LMS with other systems in your organisation.

We use industry standard Web Services so even if a toolkit is not available for your favourite environment you can still use Talis Keystone for your integration projects. If you have a specific requirement or something to share, come and join the discussion in the forum.

Talis Keystone sandbox

If your organisation has not yet purchased Talis Keystone but you would like to see what Talis Keystone has to offer, you can use the Talis Keystone sandbox, which provides a live and accessible instance of Talis Keystone on the Internet. The sandbox is not just a bunch of static pages but a live environment for developers to experiment with the API and try out innovative ideas and real integration solutions. The sandbox is backed by a dedicated instance of the Talis LMS, including Talis Prism (OPAC) (see the Talis Keystone sandbox Architecture). We have provided this dedicated environment for use solely within the sandbox. For the View My Account API we have provided a number of preconfigured borrowers/patrons for you to use.

The Talis Keystone sandbox is currently a small environment and all users will be currently sharing the borrowers provided. We will be monitoring the system actively for usage and assessing load - as the service becomes more popular within the community we will scale the architecture in-line with the demand.

So please use this area of the Talis Developer Network to access the services, and engage with us and each other using the forum and in the blogosphere. Tell us what you like about the service and what we can improve upon, but above all, enjoy experimenting what you can do with Talis Keystone.

Regards,

The Talis Keystone Team