Paul Miller reports on the latest meeting of the Z39.50 community's Implementor's Group, which met in Stockholm over the summer.
In the midst of the world-famous water festival [1], members of the Z39.50 community's Implementor's Group gathered in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, for the 29th meeting of the group.
The meeting was hosted by LIBRIS [2] and the Swedish Royal Library [3], and took place in a hotel just across the park from the Royal Library itself.
Z39.50, for those who don't know, is the common name of the United States' ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995, Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification, and the same name is usually understood to also encompass the near identical international ISO 23950:1998, Information and documentation - Information retrieval (Z39.50) - Application service definition and protocol specification. More information on Z39.50 is available from the Maintenance Agency [4] hosted by Library of Congress, and in a recent article published in Ariadne [5].
The Z39.50 Implementor's Group, or ZIG, is an informal grouping of vendors, users, and others, who meet once every six months or so to address issues which have arisen in use of the Standard, and to work towards additions and refinements which add functionality to the already rich set. Meetings tend to alternate between Europe and North America in order to reach as many of the existing Implementors as possible.
Attendees at this meeting were primarily European, and included representatives of national and other libraries, system vendors, and a few members of the Higher Education Community. The next meeting will be held in Texas in January of 2000 [6] and is open to anyone interested in shaping the way that Z39.50 continues to evolve.
As the agenda [7] illustrates, discussions ranged from quite detailed exploration of Z39.50 Tag Sets, through a review of important work to enable dissemination of Copy Holdings information via Z39.50 (not just "does the library own this book?" as now, but "is this book actually available for me to take out?"), and into discussion of continuing Profiling work with the International Interoperability Profile (now called the Bath Profile and available in draft form for comment [8]) and the Zthes Profile for Thesaurus Navigation [9].
As is usually the way at events such as this, cameras were wielded, and at least two sets of photographs are available online. The first, compiled by Ray Denenberg of the Z39.50 Maintenance Agency at Library of Congress, illustrates a range of events during the meeting [10]. The second, on the LIBRIS site, relates to a wine reception hosted by the Royal Library [11].
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Paul Miller
Interoperability Focus
UKOLN, c/o Academic Services: Libraries
University of Hull
HULL
HU6 7RX
United Kingdom
URL: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Tel: +44 1482 466890
Email: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk
Paul Miller is employed as Interoperability Focus at UKOLN (the UK Office for Library and Information Networking). His responsibilities include advising on the development of interoperable solutions within and between such diverse communities as libraries, museums, and archives. |
For citation purposes:
Paul Miller, "Z39.50 Implementor's Group (ZIG), Stockholm", Exploit Interactive,
issue 3, October 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue3/zig/>
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