Dave,

I have also found the keyword search of Innovative's Z39.50 to be extremely
problematic. When using it with LibraryFind our reference staff were VERY
unhappy with it. Oregon State's catalog search results in LibraryFind look
better but I don't know what they might have done to improve things.

Known item searching works great though which is a lot of what we want to do
here. We also want to connect it with our link resolver to get at print
holdings. Searching for a specific Title seems to work well too, which is
another use we have for it, because we want to search the catalog from our
content management system and add specific items to web pages.

I wanted to get Yaz Proxy to work because I thought that would allow me to
write code which would be fairly reusable between the WorldCat API and Yaz
Proxy in from of our Innovative catalog.

Karen


On 5/15/08 3:47 PM, "Walker, David" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>> Has anyone on this list considered
>> this option or tried it out?
>
> We (and no doubt many others) have been using Innovative's Z39.50 server with
> our metasearch and link resolver systems -- not with a yaz-proxy/SRU interface
> on top, but just directly using Z39.50 clients.
>
> It works well with our link resolver, since in that context we are doing known
> item searches, usually with a standard number.  And it gives us back
> availability and journal holdings data probably better than the other ILS
> systems we work with.
>
> It doesn't work as well in our metasearch environment, however.  There are
> number of bugs with how the keyword search is implemented in the Z39.50
> server, which I've never been able to resolve (would love for someone to
> correct me here).  It reports erroneous hit counts and sorts the records in
> system id order (so oldest records come back first), and is sometimes flaky
> when implemented for an Innreach system.  It really is quite horrible.
>
> --Dave
>
> -------------------
> David Walker
> Library Web Services Manager
> California State University
> http://xerxes.calstate.edu
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Code for Libraries on behalf of Karen Coombs
> Sent: Thu 5/15/2008 10:03 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Life after Expect
>
>
>
> There are some very useful things one can get back from III via Z39.50.
> Terry Resse from OSU showed me that if you send a Z39.50 request for the
> "opac" syntax you can actually get back holdings information and whether or
> not something is checked out. I had no trouble playing around with this via
> the Z39.50 piece of MARC edit and getting back the data I wanted.
>
> Based on this info and reading about yaz-proxy, I've been hoping that by
> implementing yaz-proxy that I might setup an SRW/U service for III. Has
> anyone on this list considered this option or tried it out?
>
> Karen

--
Karen A. Coombs
Head of Libraries' Web Services
University of Houston
114 University Libraries
Houston, TX  77204-2000
Phone: (713) 743-3713
Fax: (713) 743-9811
Email: [log in to unmask]