Z39.50 and Digital Library Union Catalogues

[Walter Lewis]

A cluster of questions have been percolating in the neighbourhood that
are triggered by the use of WWW/Z39.50 gateways and the searching of
multiple meta-data sources for projects that are currently available on
the WWW.  More specifically I have been looking at Project Gutenburg,
the Making of America initiatives at U Mich and Cornell, the work at
Virginia and a variety of other projects identified in the Digital
Libraries www site at Carnegie-Mellon.

Leaving aside the raging controversies over the suitability of various
sites/documents on the WWW, by-and-large I suspect libraries could agree
that these titles are "safe". [leaving aside academic questions of
suitability of edition and errors of transcription] In many cases on the
public library side of the equation we may even have discarded these
titles in the search to squeeze current material into buildings that
were too small when they were built.  Here seems an opportunity to put
them back into patron's hands when appropriate. 

In the case of Project Gutenburg I found a "list".  In some of the other
projects there appear to be more sophisticated databases, CGI's, and
meta-data collections that intermediate in the use of the collection.

Is anyone building freely accessible Z39.50 targets that attempt to
cover this data?  Are the libraries that are building these collections,
integrating it into their own catalogues or conceiving stand-alone
targets for this material (to reduce the outside demand on their own
catalogues)?  Is it "good enough" to let the Alta Vista's of the WWW try
and find this stuff for us?

Walter Lewis
Deputy Chief/Systems		WebMaster
Halton Hills Public Library	HALINET