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.
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? If this is correct, I'm faced with a problem. About a quarter of the entries in POPLINE are monographs and the rest are articles appearing in periodicals. Should I try to force this into a MARC format and use a Z39.50 server to allow access? Or, should I write an HTTP API and allow searches on port 80 and return information in XML? I'd like to be as similar to any standard or de facto standard, such as PubMed, as possible, to aid in adoption and ease of use. Is there a well-accepted standard for articles in journals similar to MARC if MARC shouldn't be used? Should I, or even can I, write a Z39.50 server that returns a result in MARC if it was a monograph, or in XML if it was an article? Finally, I know this list is specifically about the use of perl in libraries, and I'm taking quite a liberty asking these questions here. Is there another, more broadly focused list that I should be asking questions like this on? Thank you for all your advice and suggestions. -Kevin Zembower ----- E. Kevin Zembower Internet Systems Group manager Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communications Programs 111 Market Place, Suite 310 Baltimore, MD 21202 410-659-6139
