Report to
the CIC on the State of Z39.50
Within the
Consortium
Prepared by Mark Hinnebusch
May 19, 1998
Final Revision August 29,
1998
Executive Overview
While the state of Z39.50 support in the CIC is far from perfect, with modifications to the WebZ configuration files, improvements can be made in the ability to search the various catalogs of the CIC using Z39.50. With some corrections to local server configuration files, even more improvements can be made. Given these changes, if some of the vendors having installed products in CIC libraries will improve specific areas of support of Z39.50, satisfactory search of individual catalogs is possible. With some software development of the WebZ client to change how multi-server searches are constructed, a satisfactory broadcast search capability should be possible.
This report describes indexing capabilities and identifies the search attributes supported by the various Z39.50 servers currently in operation in the CIC and notes discrepancies between what the vendors document, what the customers have configured, what the outside world sees, and what the OCLC WebZ client configuration contains. As an addendum to this report is a modified version of the httpgate.vel configuration file for WebZ, which should provide the most comprehensive Z39.50 search capabilities possible absent development work by one or more vendors.
The report is available in two formats:
1. Z39.50 Report (PDF file)
This report is available in Adobe Acrobat format. An
Acrobat reader is available for downloading here.
2. HTML version of the Narrative Portion of the Z39.50 Report