The technology industry has been buzzing about XML as a way of handling on-line ordering and claiming, but EDT continues to be dominant. The total value of transactions using EDT and EDIFACT, its international counterpart, was $3.1 trillion in 1999 according to Giga Information Group, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass-based market research group. The growth rate exceeds 15 percent per year.
Although XML holds promise with its more flexible format, the vast majority of 2,000 organizations surveyed by Gray's Electronic Commerce Research Group of Chicago say their satisfactory experience with EDI/EDIFACT and the lack of XML standards and XML product development
makes EDT their preferred solution for online commerce. In the past three years, many organizations have moved EDT/EDIFACT transactions to the Internet and have created Web-based forms to make data entry easier.
IBM, one of the firms surveyed and a seller of XML solutions, does more than 90 percent of its business with 12,000 suppliers using EDT/EDIFACT.
Libraries have not enjoyed the benefits of EDT/EDTFACT because of the confusion caused by various standards for on-line ordering and claiming. First BISAC was promoted, then EDT x.12, then. EDIFAC3T, and now XML. The current international standard is EDTFACT—now endorsed by the American National Standards Institute as the successor to EDT x.12 and by the National Information Standards Organization as the successor to BISAC. The standard is not due to be reviewed for possible replacement until 2003. When negotiating a contract, seek to include a clause that provides for conformity to a new standard for online ordering and claiming and ask to be included in the vendor's regular enhancement program.
XML is being used by at least one vendor in an application for which no standard currently exists. DRA has developed an XML patron authentication server that allows remote, third-party systems to query information in the patron databases of DRA systems. Once a third-party supports DRA's query format and understands the data elements, it can perform the same type of query with any DRA customer that uses the authentication server. DRA is promoting XIMIL as an industry standard. NISO, the standards body for the library community, may take as little as a year or as much as three years to adopt a standard.
