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Bill Dueber writes: > > 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". > > Like so many library "standards," z30.50 is a syntax and a set of > rough guidelines. You have no idea what's actually happening on the > other end, because it's not specified, and you just have to either > find someone you can ask at the target machine or reverse engineer > it. The irony is that Z39.50 actually make _much_ more effort to specify semantics than most other standards -- and yet still finds itself in the situation where many implementations do not respond correctly to the BIB-1 attribute 6=3 (completeness=complete field) which is how Eric should be able to do what he wants here. Not that I have any good answers to this problem ... but I DO know that inventing more and more replacement standards it NOT the answer. Everything that's come along since Z39.50 has suffered from exactly the same problem but more so. _/|_ ___________________________________________________________________ /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk )_v__/\ "Not raw -- cooked" -- Monty Python's Flying Circus.