ColdFusion and XML searching/harvesting protocols

[Nick Dobbing]

Hello everyone,

I'm writing from the University of Guelph, in Ontario. We're an 
Endeavor/Voyager site, and we use ColdFusion MX fairly extensively for web 
programming.

I've recently become interested in the possibility of emulating (more or 
less) what the Library of Congress has done with Voyager, its Z39.50 server, 
and Yaz Proxy, a Z39.50 to XML gateway (see 
http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/). As many of you probably know, 
they use this technology to create a web front end for Z39.50 searches of 
their catalogue (see http://www.loc.gov/z3950/).

As ColdFusion is fairly fluent in XML and web services, I'm starting to look 
into building utilities to that could talk to a Yaz Proxy gateway, and also 
perhaps other  interfaces against other XML standards that are appropriate 
to searching and harvesting metadata, such as OAI-PMH (see 
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html).

I know that ColdFusion is used in many libraries, and I've been looking 
around, but haven't been able to find out if anyone else is doing this kind 
of thing.

Are any of you doing work along these lines, or interested in sharing 
knowledge and techniques for using ColdFusion to solve library business 
problems? Alternatively, is anyone aware of a ColdFusion user group where 
library issues are discussed?

Regards,

Nick Dobbing
ndobbing at uoguelph.ca
Senior Systems Analyst
University of Guelph Library
http://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/