On 9/1/05, KEVIN ZEMBOWER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have a general, perhaps philosophical, question. I'm trying to make my > collection of reference material on reproductive health called POPLINE (check > it out at www.popline.org) available through what I thought were Z39.50 > servers. I was basing this assumption on what I thought was a Z39.50 client > in a program called Endnote that the researchers in my organization use to > search other medical databases, such as PubMed > (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi). I always just assumed that > this was a Z39.50 client and responding with MARC records, until a librarian > I'm working with to understand MARC told me that MARC's main purpose is to > catalog monographs, and that it's not particularly well suited to represent > articles in journals and periodicals.
I'm not sure what technology backs up the Entrez searches, but it isn't MARC and Z39.50. MARC is suitable for cataloging things other than monographs, such as journal titles and other serial publications, but your librarian friend is correct that it isn't well-suited to individual journal articles. > Further research on the PubMed site now leads me to believe that Endnote must > have written a client that allows it to search PubMed on port 80 and get > answers in XML format. I'm going to ask this question of the PubMed support > list, but can anyone on this list tell me off the top of their head if this > is correct or not? I did a fair bit of scripted searching of PubMed via Entrez in an earlier position, and I believe that the XML format is the data-richest of the formats you can get back. Note that your search will go in two stages: a search that returns the primary IDs of matching records, via esearch, and a posting of these IDs to fetch the complete records, via efetch (see the EUtilities link Ed posted). The PubMed XML format is specified in a series of DTDs [1]. It sounds like you are facing the problem of aggregating records in different formats. I believe that the PubMed XML format can accomodate monographs, but I can't say if it's right for your application. My impression is that it is tailored for journal articles. It is a moderately complex XML application--not as simple as DC. Chuck [1] <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/DTD/index.html>
