Z39.50 applications in a medical school
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045547 |
| Published date | 01 February 1997 |
| Date | 01 February 1997 |
| Pages | 143-147 |
| Author | Alain Besson,Bob Chapman,Kate Cheney |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Z39.50 applications in a medical
school
BRIEF
COMMUNI-
CATION
Alain Besson, Bob Chapman and Kate Cheney
St Bartholomew's and the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary
and Westfield College (University of London), West Smithfield, London EC1A 7BE, UK
E-mail: a.besson@mds.qmw.ac.uk
After nearly a decade in the making, the Z39.50 protocol is quickly finding its place in many library systems,
giving libraries the opportunity to link applications in ways hitherto not possible.
St Bartholomew's and the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry currently runs two applications with
Z39.50 capabilities on a TCP/IP based WAN spanning four sites: SIRSI's Unicorn (the School Library's
automation system) and Ovid (Medline and full-text databases). Access to Unicorn is available to anyone with
a telnet
connection,
and a Web version (SIRSI's WebCat) will be implemented shortly. Ovid is available on the
School sites in both a Windows client-server version and through Ovid's Web gateway.
To facilitate the process of finding journal articles —
as opposed to bibliographic citations — Ovid has
long had the ability to link citations to the holdings of
the users' local library. This link to local holdings is
normally established by the system administrator in
the form of a database of local messages. This
involves scanning a list of the journals covered by
Medline and any other installed database, flagging
journals which are held locally, and typing a holdings
message appropriate to each and every one of
them.
There are limitations to this local holdings facility.
The messages typed by the system administrator
can be as specific as they need to be, but large or
multi-site libraries cannot provide different
messages for all the journals they hold because the
system limits both the number and the length of the
messages. Entering local messages is a laborious
procedure, a difficulty compounded when more than
one database is subscribed to; and special care
must be taken to preserve local messages during
system updates and whenever journals change title.
To a large extent these limitations can be overcome
with Z39.50 inter-operability.
Local holdings information is already specified in the
School's library catalogue, the Unicorn collection
management system. Both Ovid and Unicorn are
Z39.50 compliant, and getting Ovid to interrogate
Unicorn about local holdings is precisely what
Z39.50 is all about.
With Z39.50, citations retrieved by Ovid users are
matched against Unicorn records on the basis of
ISSNs. For journals whose ISSNs are common
across the databases, Ovid automatically generates
a 'Local Holdings' paragraph containing the MARC
field assigned to holdings information in Unicorn.
Ovid can use any MARC field for that purpose, and
in our case a locally-definable field was selected to
provide amalgamated information in a multi-site
context.
The name of the 'Local Holdings' paragraph
in Ovid can be defined by the system administrator
(Figure 1).
Because Ovid automatically attaches this new
Z39.50-generated 'Local Holdings' paragraph to the
relevant citations, there is no need to build and
maintain a database of local messages specific to
individual journal titles. It is still desirable, however,
for the system administrator to tell Ovid which
journals are held locally (by means of a simple
Yes/No flag), because it is on that basis that the
system can process a user's request to limit a
search to local holdings.
The second Z39.50 implementation in the School
gives Ovid users direct access to Unicorn from
within
Ovid.
Instead of exiting Ovid at the end of a
Medline search, users can select Unicom as just
another database (Figure 2). The Unicorn interface
is one of the best features of the system, but for a
simple author or title search the Ovid interface is
more than adequate and conveniently provides
seamless access to the library catalogue (Figure 3).
All the system administrator has to do is add an
entry for the library catalogue in the list of databases
accessible via the Ovid front-end.
Our experience with Z39.50 has been a salutary
reminder that information providers increasingly
have to think in terms of global information provision.
This technology has created a need to anticipate
The Electronic Library, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1997 143
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