I think in order to accomplish this you'd have to send a completeness
or truncation attribute:

@attr 1=4 6=3 "foo bar" # search for 'foo bar' as the complete field
@attr 1=4 6=2 "foo bar" # search for 'foo bar' as the complete subfield
@attr 1=4 5=100 "foo bar" # do not truncate - although this is
probably not exactly right.

The full list is here:
http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/defns/bib1.html

Although I will bet that Aleph (which I assume you're querying)
doesn't support any of this.

I actually just wrote about this exact thing tonight:
http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/2009/04/commoditizing-the-stack/

-Ross.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> What are the ways to accomplish exact title searches with z39.50?
>
> I'm looping through a list of MARC records trying to determine whether or
> not we own multiple copies of an item. After reading MARC field 245,
> subfield a I am creating the following z39.50 query:
>
>  @attr 1=4 "foo bar"
>
> Unfortunately my local implementation seems to interpret this in a rather
> regular expression sort of way -- "* foo bar *". Does anybody out there know
> how to create a more exact query? I only want to find titles exactly
> equalling "foo bar".
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University of Notre Dame
>