Korean Z39.50 servers

Please add following Z39.50 servers for Korean books.

National Library of Korea
211.185.62.28:55200/dan

National Assembly Library of Korea
www.nanet.go.kr:2100/MONO

Records are encoded in EUC-KR. Record format is KORMARC, a variant of MARC21.

LibraryThing may not yet understand that MARC records can be encoded in a character set other than MARC8 / Ansel. This is actually already a problem. MIT records are in ISO-8859-1 (regardless of what a rather confused explanation of downconverting on the library's site says); compare MIT and LoC publisher names in MARC records for 0817634363.

Fortunately, euc-kr has ASCII in the 7-bit positions. So it works either way: convert network results to Unicode and do MARC processing or do MARC structure based on ASCII and convert data fields from {Ansel,ISO 5426, ISO 6937,ISO 8859,EUC,...} to {UCS,UTF}.

A quick check of the server against the couple books I have here looked right to me (admittedly with a client that has nothing at all to do with LT).

Is there any progress on this?

This is priority a-number-one for me. I am working on it, I can't report progress yet because it's more difficult than one may think and I'm trying my best to sort out the problems so I can begin making sense of them!

Thanks for keeping track,

-c-

I just got both these Korean sources working with LibraryThing (I only found out about them this morning). Hope they were worth the wait! They appear to be working quite well -- there should be no issues with character encoding or MARC parsing. Neither one supports a general keyword search, though, so they can only be searched by title.

ISBN seems to work.

Hooray! I added bunch of books and authors, which you can browse from Common Knowledge Author Nationality: Korea.
http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?q=Korea&f=18&exac...

The list includes historic figures like 김시습, 이순신, 정약용, best-selling novelists like 김훈, 박완서, 이문열, philosopher 김용옥, and new faces like 김영하, 이정명.

Great!

Hello! I found this post while looking for access to the National Library of Korea's Marc Z39.50 server. I am trying to catalog Korean books for a small, private, international school. I did add the info above and it tested successfully, but I am not getting any hits for the ISBNs I have added. They are all Korean children's books. Does anyone have any ideas. The task is daunting as I cannot read Korean. :)

Did you try the titles? Casey said (msg 5) that titles should work...though I'm not sure in what character set. Note also that this thread is from 2006/2008, so it's possible the connection stopped working since then.