EBSCO Announces Plans to Develop Fully Open APIs for YBP’s GOBI Services and Subscription Service Division’s Journal Services
Heres a Statement Shared This AM From EBSCO HQ in Ipswich, MA:
On the heels of the recent acquisition of YBP, EBSCO has made the official company decision to develop fully open APIs for both YBP’s GOBI services and its subscription service division’s journal services that can be readily consumed by ILS and other technology services providers.
According to Stratton Lloyd, EBSCO’s Executive Vice President of Product Management, this approach is about supporting library decisions, and providing the technical flexibility to allow customers to decide how and which services to use.
“We don’t think libraries should be forced into a closed environment that depends upon the use of a single vendor’s tools,” he said. “We want to support our library customer’s desire to integrate ‘best of breed’ workflows seamlessly across their entire process. Therefore, we’ve developed partnerships with nearly every publisher, content provider and ILS vendor as well as other library services companies. We want to enable an environment where libraries can choose the best of each component within their services’ infrastructure, and know that they will work well with other components.”
He continued, “These are exciting times. Closed services should be a thing of the past, and APIs provide an avenue for collaboration and partnership. These APIs will be made available to all vendors and libraries. We are putting the staffing resources on these projects and will provide updates as we progress with development.”
Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), EBSCO, Libraries, Management and Leadership, Publishing, Resources

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.