[WEB4LIB] z29.50 (was re: The Next Five Years)

[Jeremy Frumkin]

Do not discount the value of Z39.50, or gateways like Z39.50 (should they
evolve). While it is true that XML gives us a delivery mechanism at the
syntax level, we still need ways to access information that we have a) no
control over and b) is in proprietary formats. The ability to map
information into the Z39.50 standard provides us the capability of accessing
data without having to restructure that same data. So, although I may have
my information stored as RDF/XML, I can still map to Z39.50, as can the
library down the street that still uses USMARC. In the next 5 years, Z39.50
will be JUST AS, IF NOT MORE important to the library world then it is
today.


Jeremy

Thomas Dowling wrote:

>
> 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

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