Getting Started — Mitinet Integration Services

An overview of what the integration involves and what your team needs to build.

Mitinet Integration Services (MIS) partners with circulation software companies to embed Mitinet's MARC metadata management tools directly into their platforms. Once integrated, your users — catalog librarians and administrators — can access Mitinet services like AnalyzeMARC™ and BestMARC™ without ever leaving your software.

The integration has four distinct areas of work. Each is summarized below. Full technical details, request/response schemas, and code examples are in the Implementation Guide.

What You Need to Build

1

Account Linking For each customer account in your system that is licensed to use Mitinet services, you must call the Mitinet API to create a link between your account identifier and the corresponding Mitinet customer so that users can self-register to use Mitinet tools by simply selecting their site and entering basic contact information. This call is made once per account at license creation time, and must be triggered automatically by your business system going forward.

See implementation details →
2

License Updates Whenever a customer renews their license, call the Mitinet API to update the expiration date on their Mitinet account. This ensures their access to Mitinet tools stays current.

See implementation details →
3

Partner API (Endpoints You Build) Mitinet needs to call back into your system at a few key points in the job lifecycle: to request a MARC file from you (so Mitinet can run a job), and to notify you when a completed job is ready to be retrieved. You must implement these endpoints within your platform and register them with Mitinet.

See implementation details →
4

ILS User Interface Your ILS needs a way for users to launch the Mitinet/BestMARC portal. BestMARC is loaded in an embedded iframe within your interface, authenticated via a POST request. Your page also listens for messages from BestMARC to handle cross-application workflows — most notably, when a user initiates a record export from within BestMARC, your ILS receives a message, presents its own record selection UI, uploads the selected records, and notifies BestMARC that the records are ready.

See implementation details →

Getting started quickly: If you have a large existing customer base, Mitinet can optionally accept a flat file of your existing accounts to jump-start the linking process while you implement the API. Contact your Mitinet integration representative to discuss this option.

What Mitinet Provides

Upon signing a partner agreement, Mitinet will provide:

API credentials
FTP access for MARC file exchange
Your assigned PartnerID for integration and login

FTP access is provided via a Mitinet-hosted server by default. If your organization prefers to use your own FTP server, Mitinet can connect to that instead — this will be discussed and agreed upon during the partner onboarding process.

Next Steps

Ready to implement? The Implementation Guide covers each area in full technical detail, including all request and response schemas, FTP setup, the iframe message protocol, and a complete annotated sample page.

The interactive API Documentation lets you explore and test all Mitinet API endpoints directly in your browser.