Our Web Service is an on-demand service that can operate as the back end to your website. One of the benefits is that we are holding that data for you, so you don't need to maintain your own database. You are allowed to do some limited data caching for display on your site, but it's a good practice to periodically send a query to update that information to ensure you have the most current data. Our Web Service bibliographic data is updated every 2 hours.
How It Works for Your Site
- Customer submits a search on your site.
- Your site sends a query to our server.
- Our server sends you the response.
- You display the response for your customer.
Web Service contracts are based on usage/hits to the server. There are several tiers of service; the higher the tier, the more hits you are allowed. We audit the monthly hits to the server for each account. If your account exceeds the allowable amount for the subscription for 2-3 months in a row, you will be moved up to the appropriate tier/pricing, with notification.
For security purposes, we prefer that SOAP protocol is used with our Web Service. If you need to use REST instead, you'll need to partner with Data Services.
When you subscribe, you will be provided with a User ID, password, and URL to the test environment that your developer can use to write the code to query our data. Once your queries have been reviewed by our team, we will supply you with a User ID, password, and URL for our production environment.