z29.50 (was re: The Next Five Years)

[Thomas Dowling]

>> 3. Does anyone but
>librarians even care about
>Z39.50? and
>
>Why people care about
>Z39.50: Patrons are looking
>for the one-stop
>shopping place for
>information...

That doesn't make z39.50 the correct solution for this problem.  Z39.50
development is chugging slowly away in an insular little development
community, while faster moving segments of the IT world are quickly
putting together ways to manage and merge text databases in the terabyte
range.  Their tools are more likely to be XML (perhaps RDF), something
like a web spider, an off-the-shelf database program, and a few hundred
lines of Perl.  Those are tools designed to do in six months what z39.50
hasn't accomplished in six years.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu