Z39.50

Z39.50	Chorus « Electronic Research « Notes

» What is Z39.50?
March 5, 1998; Revised September 1, 1998
By John G. Norman

Z39.50 is the ANSI/NISO Information Retrieval Service and Protocol Standard (for more information on the standard, see the pages maintained by Dan Brickley). The protocol defines the exchange of messages between clients and database-serving hosts. Client software sends a database query; the host replies with a list of matching records, which may then be requested for transfer.

For readers of Chorus, Z39.50 means that a scholar can easily browse remote library catalogs and research databases from his or her office.

Among the many information sources that provide Z39.50 services are the Library of Congress, the UC MELVYL system, OCLC, the National Library of Medicine, Ovid, etc.

There are two key advantages to using a Z39.50 client with personal bibliographical software. First of all, since you'll be using one client to connect to a variety of databases, you'll only have to learn one interface. Second, the software can manage the conversion of remote data to its local form--you will not have to save the results of a search to disk and then convert them to your database format.

If you use RIS's ProCite or Reference Manager, or Oberon's Citation, then you can use BookWhere? 2000 (see our review by John Morris); the new version, 3.0, of EndNote, from Niles Software, includes a free Z39.50 client (see our review).