For info....(apologies if you have seen this already!)

	From:		    CNI-ANNOUNCE Digest 16

       CIC INITIATES LARGE SCALE ASSESSMENT OF Z39.50
                        APPLICATIONS

Champaign, IL,  January 8, 1998  A ground-breaking
assessment of the implementation and application of
the Z39.50 standard across 13 major research
libraries  is expected to provide critical guidance
to information specialists throughout the world.  As
part of the development of their Virtual Electronic
Library initiative, the Committee on Institutional
Cooperation (CIC) has commissioned Mark Hinnebusch,
Associate Director for the Florida Center for Library
Automation and the Chair of the Z39.50 Implementers
Group, to conduct the study.

Z39.50 is an American national standard for
information retrieval. It is formally known as
ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995 - Information Retrieval
(Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol
Specification. The standard enables remote querying
of databases on remote servers, and is the technical
foundation which allows users on any CIC campus to
query the library catalogs of all other CIC
universities using a standard web browser.

"This undertaking by the CIC is an exciting and
significant opportunity to prove the ability of
Z39.50 to support wide area broadcast information
search and retrieval in a large, heavily used
consortium," said Hinnebusch. "The success of this
venture will be important not just to the CIC but
also to the entire information retrieval industry."


"Our efforts to implement the Virtual Electronic
Library have been successful to date," said Sharon
Hogan, University Librarian, University of Illinois
at Chicago, and Chair of the CIC Library Directors,
"but we will not realize the potential for a robust
and flexible search utility for our 500,000 faculty,
staff, and students without some fine-tuning to our
Z39.50 applications."

The project will result in a report that will
document the Z39.50 situation in each of the CIC
research libraries, an articulation, analysis, and
description of the most significant problems, a checklist that
technical staff can use in defining
local attribute sets, and will include a
recommendation about how the CIC libraries can
generally improve the existing Z39.50-based services
to their users. The report and recommendations will
be available after May, 1998.

Barbara McFadden Allen, Director of the CIC Center
for Library Initiatives and Assistant Director of the
CIC said, "Our efforts to implement a robust virtual
catalog have been hindered by incompatibilities in
the implementation of Z39.50 within the various
automated systems used by our member libraries, and
by similar variances in local indexing and search
features. Through this study, we hope to answer many
of the questions we have about the application of
Z39.50, and influence the marketplace and our
libraries to adopt common protocol."

The CIC Virtual Electronic Library (VEL) -- a project
supported by the United  States Department of
Education through a $1.2 million Title IIA grant --
aims to deploy a seamless search and request
fulfillment system linking together all the
information resources within the CIC.

Founded in 1958, the Committee on Institutional
Cooperation (CIC), with headquarters in Champaign,
Illinois, is the academic consortium of the Big Ten
universities and the University of Chicago. Member
institutions include: the University of Chicago, the
University of Illinois, Indiana University, the
University of Iowa, the University of Michigan,
Michigan State University, the University of
Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State
University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue
University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cooperative ventures at all levels have arisen,
giving the CIC a thirty-eight year history of
effective voluntary inter-institutional cooperation
among these twelve independent universities. For more
information about the CIC, consult their web site at
http://www.cic.net/cic/.

                             ###



---------------------------------
Barbara McFadden Allen
Director, CIC Center for Library Initiatives, and
Assistant Director of the CIC
Committee on Institutional Cooperation
302 E. John / Suite 1705 / Champaign IL, 61820
Phone: (217) 333-8475 / Fax: (217) 244-7127 / Email: [log in to unmask]
CIC Web Space: http://www.cic.net/cic/



******
Kelly Russell
eLib Development Co-ordinator/JISC International Liaison

The Library		The University of Warwick	Coventry      CV4 7AL
tel:  01203 524 552		fax: 01203 524981
email: [log in to unmask]

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/


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