Judy, 

I searched the Milwaukee catalog directly and did not return any item with the 
ISBN1416504973. Nor did I find it on WorldCat or Amazon. Is it the correct ISBN 
? 

For the 13 digit ISBN you copied, make sure you haven't copied any extraneous 
characters. At least searching OCLC via Z39.50, sometimes an unnoticed space at 
the end or beginning of a number search can cause problems. 

That being said, we had a library report the same problems searching OCLC via 
the interface. I will see if I can find the helpdesk ticket to see how it was 
resolved. 








Elaine 


J. Elaine Hardy 
PINES Bibliographic Projects & Metadata Manager 
Georgia Public Library Service 
1800 Century Place, Ste 150 
Atlanta, Ga. 30345-4304 

404.235-7128 
404.235-7201, fax 
[email protected] 
www.georgialibraries.org 
www.georgialibraries.org/pines 



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Judy Daniluk" <[email protected]> 
To: [email protected] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 5:42:13 PM 
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Inconsistent results searching Z39.50 




We recently migrated a group of small libraries to Evergreen. All of the 
libraries are having trouble searching Z39.50. It seems like the search gives 
up too quickly or just returns without doing the search. 



Here’s an example of the kind of frustration we’re having – we search for the 
10-digit ISBN number 1416504973. The Milwaukee Public Library connection should 
return a record, but the search returns no results about 4 out of 5 times. 
About 1 out of 5 times the exact same search returns 1 record from Milwaukee. 
Even with Milwaukee as the only service selected for the search, it returns no 
results most of the time. It returns within a few seconds whether there are 
results or not. 



The record I get from Milwaukee from that search also contains a 13-digit ISBN 
number. If I copy that number and search on it, it fails to return the 
Milwaukee record (where I got the number) about nine out of ten times. The 
tenth time it works. 



Does anybody have suggestions for improving the Z39.50 search process? We are 
still on 1.4.0.6 – will the results be better in version 1.6? 





Judy Daniluk 

Technology Consultant 

North Texas Library Partners 

6320 Southwest Blvd, Suite 101, Fort Worth, TX 76109 

[email protected] 817-201-6778(cell) 817-377-4440(office) www.ntrls.org 



North Texas Library Partners, Home of the North Texas Regional Library System 

...Saving the world, one North Texas library at a time! 



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