On 5/8/07, Adam Brin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Godmar, Just FYI, David's script doesn't work with all III catalogs. Z39.50 might be a slightly better option (our's, for example, seems to produce errors from his test page). I'd be willing to work with you on it, if you're up for trying to figure out why it doesn't work in our case.
Let's take the specific issues with your catalog off-list, but let me make one general point on list: I don't mean to prescribe or even propose a particular implementation (screenscraping, Z39.50, proprietary XML interface, etc.) - there could be multiple implementations, chosen by whoever wishes to export their legacy services. All that should be agreed upon is a set of query syntaxes and a set of response formats. Ideally, the cardinality of both sets should be small. As such, a Z39.50 to XML gateway is certainly an option if the produced XML is within the set of useful response formats. I tried using PHP/yaz for this purpose a couple of years ago - this worked so-so - it wasn't particularly fast. It is potentially harder to deploy since not everybody will be able to install libyaz.so on their servers, but for those that could it's certainly an option. I should point out, however, that the XML produced was not the nice MARC-XML that David's script produces, so it would require another conversion step. - Godmar
