Current Issue (Issue 104)

ZMARCO is an Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 2.0 compliant data provider. The 'Z' in ZMARCO stands for Z39.50; 'MARC' stands for MAchine-Readable Cataloging; and the 'O' stands for OAI, as in the Open Archives Initiative. Essentially ZMARCO allows MARC records which are available through a Z39.50 server to relatively easily be made available via the OAI-PMH. Among the supported metadata formats are Dublin Core, MARCXML, and MODS. Programming language used in creating ZMARCO is ASP, JavaScript and Visual Basic.

The rationale for ZMARCO is that Z39.50 and MARC are fairly ubiquitous in the traditional library world, while at the same time the OAI-PMH is quickly being adopted as a light-weight protocol for the sharing of metadata within the digital library community. Therefore, it would seem useful to develop a tool that would allow the ubiquitous (but complex) Z39.50 and MARC protocols to be utilized for the creation of the OAI data providers, thereby making the huge amount of data which is already available via these older standards also available via the new OAI-PMH. This is an attempt toward that end.

ZMARCO basically consists of two components. The first is a simple ZMARCO database which must be pre-populated with some minimal data which are periodically harvested from the Z39.50 server. ZMARCO will automatically create an Access database the first time it is run but for high usage and frequent simultaneous harvesting scenarios, using a more robust database such as Oracle or SQL Server would be preferred. The second component of ZMARCO is the actual OAI data provider. These are various Active Server Page scripts written in VBScript and JScript. They parse out and handle the various OAI requests, interfacing with the ZMARCO database or the Z39.50 server as required.

*************************************************************

Site of the Week:- http://oslis.k12.or.us/secondary/howto/

This page gives the links to the resources on various topics such as Citing Sources: When and how to cite references you use; The Research Process: How to plan your research, locate the best sources, and put it all together; Search Strategies; Tips on using some of the popular search engines and directories; Evaluating Information: How to critically evaluate the information you find on the Web; Gathering and Organizing Information: How to take good research notes and avoid plagiarism in the process; Presenting Results; Online Tools and Links to Quick References.