Future-Proofing Z39.506 December 2000

John A. Kunze

UC San Francisco and

National Library of Medicine

Z39.50 History: a Personal Look

• Inception and OSI postpartum

• Need for non-bibliographic IR

• Emergence of lean protocols and bulky markup

Z39.50 Group Dynamics

• Collective < sum of parts?

• The bike shed discussion

• The restaurant debate

• Consensus-based planning woes elsewhere

The Rise of Worse-is-Better

• Right way: the MIT school (LISP)

• Worse-is-Better way: the New Jersey school (UNIX/C)

• Worse gives ultimate computer virus (UNIX/C)

• Right gives endless design process and difficult implementation

Back to Z39.50 Design

• OSI terminology still haunts us

• ASN.1 is for Albatross, BER is for Bummer

• Dealing with library-centric reputation

• Implementation burden of MARC

Comparison with Search Engines

• Result set management not sacred

• Statefulness not sacred

• Piggybacked search

• Scan, Sort, Explain

• Init, Close, A&R Control

Z39.50 at a Crossroads

• IR over HTTP– www.google.com/search?q=pub+grub– ?q=pub+grub&hl=en&safe=off&start=10

• NLM Entrez interface– www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez

• The XML factor