Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been used in business and industry for several years to send orders, claims, invoices, and reports between computers in a standard format. This eliminates the reentry of data prepared by one party to an exchange of messages into the system of the other. This increases both speed and accuracy, and reduces costs.
Most automated library system vendors now support EDI, as do most large book jobbers and serials subscription agencies. Unfortunately, there is considerable confusion about the standard which should be followed. The international EDI standard is known as EDIFACT (electronic data interchange for administration commerce and transport) . It has been adopted by the United Nations and the International Standards Organization. In the U.S., both NISO (National Information Standards Organization) and ANSI (American National Standards Institute) have endorsed EDIFACT and have announced that it supersedes the BISAC and EDI x.12 standards previously supported by these organizations. However, the majority of vendors of automated library systems, book jobbers, and serials subscription agents continue to support BISAC or EDI x.12, rather than EDIFACT or UN/EDIFACT, as it is also known.
EDITEUR, the Pan-European book group, has developed a recommended set of guidelines for using EDIFACT in the book industry. A dozen basic messages have been identified as essential to the book trade, and the group has detailed how messages should be composed to handle each situation that might arise. This makes the job of conforming to EDIFACT even easier.
The commitment to EDIFACT has been greatest on the part of organizations which do a great deal of international business. We were, therefore, pleased to receive a recent press release from Endeavor Information Systems and Ebsco announcing that UN/EDIFACT format invoices are now available to EBSCO Subscription Services customers using Endeavor's Voyager system. The invoice files are made available for secure transfer to the customer's system via internet file transfer protocol (FTP). The voyager process loads invoice data based upon a hierarchy of match points. Customers work with Endeavor and Ebsco to formulate the best approach.
Customers who take advantage of an FTP invoice can update financial data for serials more easily and reduce errors by eliminating manual input of data.
