DigitalKoans

Terry Reese has posted step-by-step instructions about how to harvest OAI-PMH records from the University of Michigan Libraries' MBooks digital books collection using her MarcEdit freeware program. The data can either be converted to the MARC format or stored as is. MarcEdit also has a Z39.50 client as well as crosswalks, such as MARC to Dublin Core and MARC to EAD.

The Z39.50 Target Directory from Index Data includes both Z39.50- and SRU/SRW-enabled systems.

It can be searched or browsed by name.

Index Data has released Version 1.0.1 of Pazpar2, an open source Z39.50 client.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Pazpar2 . . . can be viewed either as a high-performance metasearching middleware or a Z39.50 client with a webservice interface, depending on your perspective and needs. It is a fairly compact C program—a resident daemon—that incorporates the best we know how to do in terms of providing high performance, user-oriented federated searching. . . .

One cool thing it does is search many databases in parallel, and do it fast, without unduly loading up the user interface. . . It retrieves a set of records from each target, and performs merging, deduplication, ranking/sorting, and pulls browse facets from them. . . .

It doesn’t know anything about data models, so you can handle exotic data sources if you need to. . . you use XSLT to normalize data into an internal model—we provide examples for MARC21 and a DC-esque internal model, and configure ranking, facets, sorting, etc., from that. . . .