SCSB (Shared Collection Service Bus) maintains the collection information of items in the ReCAP facility. This information originally resided in the individual partner's ILS (Integrated Library System) only. However, to better track the item and ease the process of identifying, a copy was stored in SCSB database. SCSB also enabled cross partner borrowings and since all the requests are routed through SCSB (either through the SCSB UI or the SCSB APIs that will be used in the ILS' discovery systems) and both accession and deaccession were tracked, SCSB emerged as the single point of source for item information for all partners.

During the process of accession, both initial (initial data load of the 15 million odd items already residing in ReCAP) and ongoing (any item that are added subsequently), item information moved in to SCSB. SCSB then published these item information to the other partner institutions for use in their discovery systems to benefit their patrons (For eg, NYPL and PUL would receive information about items added by CUL) and those items that have been deaccessioned (removed from ReCAP) through the Export Data Dump API. SCSB also allows these item information to be edited in the system through the Submit Collection API.

Usage of standards was necessitated to ease, optimize and standardize the frequent movement of item data, to and fro, between SCSB and partners.

There are two main standards that are used for transmitting and receiving item information. They are

SCSB XML
MARC XML

SCSB XML is the format that is defined internally by SCSB and partners for initial accession. The partners were able to export this data in any format and SCSB XML was found to be the most optimal way to load the voluminous (~15 million items) data.

SCSB XML is also used by NYPL for ongoing accession and editing of the item data and also as the preferred format in Export Data Dump API to index item data into NYPL's discovery systems.

MARC XML is the format defined by the Library of Congress (LoC). This is the format preferred by PUL and CUL for ongoing accession and editing of the item data and also as the preferred format by them in Export Data Dump API to index item data into their respective discovery systems.

The below pages would provide samples and explanation of the schema for the two standards.