From: Adam R. M. <ama...@ma...> - 2006-12-30 17:20:41
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On Dec 30, 2006, at 03:27, Stephan Kurz wrote: > > On Sa, 30.12.2006, 12:21, Stephan Kurz wrote: > > Simon Spiegel wrote: > >> A suggestion on z39.50: Has anyone tried to either contact the >> developers of Sente or Bookend? Maybe some simple exchange format for >> server settings which can be used across all three apps could be >> established? I know that the developers of both apps are very >> responding to user's feature requests, and maybe they're willing to >> help us out here. (forget Endnote, nobody will answer there) Feel free to contact Sente about this if you're using it or have some sort of relationship with them. What options do they provide for z39.50 connections? >> I get >> the impression that you and Christian must, due to lack of >> documentation, re-invent the wheel and maybe you could save a lot of >> time here. That impression is accurate :). However, a reference manager is everyone's favorite app to reinvent, so we're not alone. >> >> simon > > Books [http://sourceforge.net/projects/books-macosx/] also has z39.50 > support to some extent. They seem to have similar problems with > encoding > and so on as they seem to currently support only Library Catalogues > using > MARC8. > I cannot test their plugins [see > http://books.aetherial.net/wordpress/?p=405] as they are unavailable > in > v2.2.3b (3.0b won't run on 10.3), so I can't say anything about their > efforts. > This piece of software is published under the MIT license (other than > Sente and Bookends which Simon mentioned). I just pulled the source for Books, out of curiosity. He's using Python scripts to parse MARC and convert it to XML, it looks like, and the server info is hardcoded into each script (which is then bundled into a separate application that is launched from Books). That can be a good approach, but it's not very compatible with the direction we're taking. > I just downloaded Bookends. They use plain text pseudo-XML "import > filter" > files for z39.50 access data and the specific MARC fields that each > library is using (just guessing, I have to admit). Based on that sample you posted, we're not going to imitate Bookends in this regard :). Thanks for checking, though. > [sample file removed from e-mail as it produces an error with > sending the > complete message] > > But they seem also only to use MARC formats, which is a growing > standard > (others like Vienna University Library are currently preparing > migration > from MAB2 to MARC). > > I think though, that it would not be that big an issue for BD to > submit > (in yaz syntax) "format MAB" or "format GRS.1" or whatever before the > actual query. It's trivial for us to retrieve records in other formats. The problem is that we don't have parsers for MAB/SUTRS/GRS-1 at present, and can't even find documentation for SUTRS. Good thing Christiaan wrote a MARC parser a few weeks ago! -- arm |