The NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol Committee (CICP) has released a Twelfth Draft of ANSI/NISO Z39.83-200x (NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol) as a NISO Draft Standard for Trial Use. The accompanying NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol DTD defines the schema for transaction initiation and response messages which together comprise the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol. The NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) "defines a repertoire of messages and associated rules of syntax and semantics for use by applications to: (1) perform the functions necessary to lend items; (2) provide controlled ac-cess to electronic resources; and, (3) facilitate co-operative management of these functions. The standard specifically addresses conditions in which the application or applications that initiate the lending of items or control of access must acquire or transmit information about the user, agency, items, and/or access that is essential to successful conclusion of the function. The protocol also addresses the use of an agency's circulation application to manage access by a user to electronic resources such as electronic books, serials, and sound recordings."

NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol Committee: "The NISO Standards Committee will base its work on the Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) developed by 3M to support self-checkout systems. The 3M SIP supports a significant portion of the inquiry and update transactions to be defined in this Protocol. In addition, the 3M SIP is in wide use by a variety of libraries and self-checkout vendors around the world. Moving from this de facto base to a national consensus standard will facilitate the development of open systems required in today's rapidly evolving information environment."

NISO: "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) develops and promotes technical standards used in a wide variety of information services. NISO is a nonprofit association accredited as a standards developer by the American National Standards Institute, the national clearinghouse for voluntary standards development in the U.S. NISO's Voting Members and other supporters include a broad base of information producers and users including libraries, publishers, government agencies, and information based businesses. NISO is a leader in shaping international standards. NISO has developed standards for Information Retrieval (Z39.50), 12083 (an SGML Tool), Z39.2 (Information Interchange Format), Codes for Languages and Countries, and Z39.18 (Scientific and Technical Reports)."