Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
The LoC has (finally!) done two smart things to help promote SRU:
1) elevated its status vis-a-vis other options (like the SOAP-based SRW)
2) put together a new website that reflects that
http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/
Yep. At Index Data, we have three guys on the SRW/U editorial board, and
this change has been brewing for awhile, as a response to the continuing
difficulty of getting the point across that SRU is really, really simple
to work with.
In addition, SRU has been adopted by the NISO Metasearch Initiative,
which is an attempt to lower the cost of providing system-to-system
access to fulltext and citation databases by using a shared, open protocol.
SRW doesn't have a lot of traction -- the SOAP substrate is inherently
more complex, and frankly it is non-trivial to produce a WSDL that can
be ingested by any SOAP engine *and* produce interoperable code. By
contrast, Z39.50 clearly wins on installed base -- there are thousands
of servers out there, and even with SRU on the scene, people are still
implementing new Z39.50 servers. The YAZ toolkit, through the 'ZOOM' API
(http://zoom.z3950.org/), makes it pretty easy to implement
client-functionality for all three protocols. In a nutshell, you use the
same API for all protocols and just state at the time of opening a new
connection what protocol should be used.
--Sebastian
Bruce
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Sebastian Hammer, Index Data
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