Whither z39.50?

[Genny Engel]

> Whether z39.50 which had archane (non-high-level-abstraction) in my 
> experience became CORBA/ODBC/... compliant is something unknown.

Perhaps you're mistaking bib-1 for Z39.50.  In the library world, bib-1 is
the record syntax definition commonly used along with Z39.50 to define not
only the query syntax but the expected kind of data to be returned; some
systems use info-1 or other definitions.  Z39.50 in libraries occupies
roughly the place of SQL in many other database environments.

To my knowledge ODBC (and JDBC for that matter) deals only with SQL and
you'd have to have another layer to translate to Z39.50.  SQL is arcane in
most library client/server environments; Z39.50 is arcane in most business
environments.  Anyone who wants to write a JDBC-to-Z39.50 link would make
it a lot easier for Javacized pages to forward queries to library servers.

Genny Engel
gen at dla.ucop.edu