Whither z39.50?

[Heinrich C. Kuhn]

Nick Arnett <narnett at verity.com> asked on Fri, 22 Aug 1997
via Web4Lib:

> I'm taking one of my periodic looks at z39.50, with an eye toward whether or
> not Verity should add support for it to our products.  Does anyone know of a
> source for estimating the installed base?  

I hope somebody else will come up with information about how to
estimate the installed base. What I myself can contribute is far
less, and it's rather parochial, but nevertheless ... :
Sometime in 1998/99 the southern half of the German library consortia
will rather completely switch to systems that support z39.50 - which
will have some influence on the installed base of z39.50 servers
and clients in Germany ... .

> Opinions about its future,
> anecdotal evidence, rants and raves are welcome, especially the degree to
> which it is making progress outside of the library community.

It is possible to search the databases provided via Ovid (not the
poet, but the firm at http://www.ovid.com) via z39.50 and probably
there are competitors to Ovid who offer the same feature.

The good thing about z39.50 is, that you can search several databases
(catalogues and other things) in one rush for matches to titles,
authors, and a rather restricted set of other things. If the infor-
mation you are looking for can be retrieved via the set common to
all databases you search in, and if the items you are looking for are 
comparatively rare, z39.50-support is a fine thing to have.

As long however as different databases have different features in 
order to accommodate for different types of material z39.50 pro-
bably won't be the one-and-only protocol via which to access all
of the databases of this world. But for some things it's a good
option to have IMHO.

Regards

Heinrich C. Kuhn

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