Gulp ... the April issue of Byte Magazine carries a short feature on ....
... "easier access to libraries" and talks about .... Z39.50.
This is based on a look at several (non-UK) European vendors and products
(it is in the International section).
I quote:
"These vendors have announced their next-generation LISes and associated
online public access catalogues (OPACs) based on client/server
architectures with interfaces to the Web and to legacy LIS databases on
mainframes. Deploying CGI, Dynamic HTML, Java, server- and client-side
JavaScript, as well as ActiveX, the new systems also replace cumbersome
terminal-based remote access.
Additionally, most of these vendors' systems capitalise on a powerful
information retrieval protocol called Z39.50 (...), standardized by ISO
and ANSI. Z39.50 enables uniformm networked access to a large number of
diverse and heterogeneous information sources."
It goes on to quote Sebastian Hammer of Index Data about the use of
Z39.50.
The vendors listed include Databasix (AdLib and AdMuse), ExLibris (Aleph),
BTJ, ELiAS (Amicus) and Sisis Informationssysteme, all of whom support
Z39.50.
It includes mention of "University of North London's JavaScript-based Web
OPAC at http://opac.unl.ac.uk/" (a Talis system).
It is written by Valerie Thompson.
Lorcan
Lorcan Dempsey <URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
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ph: +44 (0)1225 826254 UKOLN (UK Office for Library & Info Networking)
fx: +44 (0)1225 826838 University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
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