Hey guys,

I hope I'll be forgiven for making what is essentially a commercial post
-- it is just that the subject matter is so much inspired by our work
with library developers, I'd feel like a chump not to mention it.
Apologies, then; I will keep it short.

Basically, we've launched a service for libraries that are building
portals, mashups, federation, metasearching, whatever needs access to
remote discovery systems. It is designed to get around the hassle that
80% of the things that I usually want to search don't offer SRU, Z39.50,
or even for that matter a private API. Our service basically exposes
'just about anything' that we can possibly get to. We make it available
to your application through your choice of Z39.50 or SRU. We normalize
query formats and record representations; we work with custom APIs, deal
with broken SRU servers and half-broken Z39.50, we screen-scrape, we
deal with authentication, etc. If we don't already have a connector,
we'll make one at no extra charge; if it breaks later, we'll fix it.

Feel free to contact me off-list if you're interested in trying it out.

http://www.indexdata.com/masterkey-connect/

Cheers,

--Sebastian
-- 
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data
[log in to unmask]
www.indexdata.com