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  Friday, January 03, 2003 

GeoURL

At randomchaos, Scott Reynan suggests that LibraryLookup and GeoURL ought to get together. I'm not sure that's a match made in heaven, though. The barriers that stand in the way of more comprehensive coverage of libraries include incomplete directories of OPACs and noncompliant OPACs (e.g., no URL-line access, or no ISBN lookup on the URL-line). Mapping libraries to GIS coordinates doesn't seem to address those problems. Like any website, of course, a library's homepage could announce its coordinates in this way, and that would be fun and useful. GeoURL is a fascinating service! Here is the GeoURL universe from my perspective.

To join GeoURL, you add this kind of metadata to your homepage:

<META name="ICBM" content="42.93564,-72.27239">
<META name="DC.title" content="Jon Udell">

On the add form, GeoURL's author, Joshua Schachter, provides a helper to generate your metadata, and a pinger to tell GeoURL to visit your site.

I haven't been able to determine why the coordinates are labeled 'ICBM' -- which sounds ominously as though you're inviting a missile strike!

Update: Why is it called an "ICBM Address?" Old Usenet historical precedent.

 

ISSNs and Z39.50

Thanks to Alf Eaton, author of HubMed, an alternative interface to the PubMed database, for noting that LibraryLookup could easily be extended to match ISSNs. I've made the change, and if you reacquire (or recreate) your Innovative or iPac bookmarklet, you can look up an article from an abstract page like this one.

The regex change to accomplish this was simple.

From: /([/-]|isbn=)(d{9,9}[dX])/i

To: /([/-]|is[bs]n=)(d{7,9}[dX])/i

The solution isn't complete, though, because while Innovative and iPac systems use a single syntax for numeric lookup by ISBN or ISSN, Voyager and DRA treat these queries separately.

Before I muck around with those syntaxes, I have a question for Jenny's tribe. Over the holiday, I had some email discussion with Bill Oldroyd at the British Library. He reminded me of something I've been aware of for many years, but was never sure how to use: the Z39.50 protocol. Apparently, recent efforts like ZING (Z39.50 International: Next Generation) and SRU are trying to bring Z39.50 into the mainstream of the Web. My questions: Could LibraryLookup use a single Z39.50-style query syntax rather than per-OPAC query syntaxes? How many of the currently-supported libraries could, right now, respond to such queries? And, what would be the mechanism for issuing such queries?

 


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