Suggest a Z39.50 server

A common new user request is for better support for books from country X or in language X. The general answer is that LibraryThing needs access to a library with a Z39.50 server. Information on such servers can be surprisingly hard to track down. Users (or employees) of national or university libraries may be able to find them in ways that Google cannot.

This topic is a place to record server settings that might be useful but are not presently supported or to link to pages that give them. Of course, there is no guarantee that the server will be compatible with LT, or that LT staff will have enough time to set one up and test it. But it is better than not knowing what is available.

To get started, the best overall list I have found is here (from Newfoundland). Things also sometimes turn up by following the country link from the LoC's Portals to the World.

WebClarity, a company that sells a Z39.50 client for Windows for use by librarians, has a registry.

The latest request of this sort is for Chinese. I have had some success with CUHK. This page is linked to from the Library Z39.50 destinations page above. It also lists some other Hong Kong sites not on the list.

If nothing else, this will give a way to test MARC8 EACC to Unicode conversion (I found a bug in MARC4J with it) or handling of 880 tags. LoC has some of these in very new entries, but this gives many more.

Topic discussing German National Library.

Topic discussing Korean servers.

Posting requesting Israeli libraries.

I tried The Israel Union List (ULI) via MALMAD as described here. It worked for a few books I have published there in Hebrew, except (there's always an "except" with this stuff, isn't there?) that the results are in UTF-8 but have a blank in the leader field that should have a if it's MARC21 as they claim. So, you have to force the encoding.

Later posting in the same thread requesting "reputable" Italian libraries.

Combining this list, this thread, and a bit of detective work:

Library Host Port Database Format Encoding
Public
SBN (Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale) opac.sbn.it 3950 nopac UNIMARC ¹
Academic
Università degli Studi di Firenze opac.unifi.it 210 OPAC UNIMARC <sup>2

1</sup>Many accents seem to be ignored or done with apostrophes. Still looking for a good test record.
²Accents are mostly UNIMARC. So, C1 for grave and C2 for acute. But instead of using the 8-bit form, SO (^N) is used to switch to G1 and SI (^O) to switch back. So, grave is 0E 41 0E (^NA^O). I don't know if this has a standard name.

I don't know if the following will be useful:

National Central Library in Taiwan, regulations on Z39.50 are at www.ncl.edu.tw/bulletin/regulations/12-4資訊檢索服務與協定.pdf
(associated: the national bibliographic info network is at and a link to a Z39.50 application on this page http://nbinet.ncl.edu.tw/screens/z39menua.html)

There's a paper on collaboration with US libraries in English at pnclink.org/pnc2005/chi/Presentation-PDF/008-Bau%20Mei%20Cheng.pdf which may be completely irrelevant, but has contact names on it.

Let's see if I can manage not to embarrass myself.

The title 資訊檢索服務與協定 sounds a bit like a translation of Information Retrieval (Z39.50-1995): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification, the official title of the standard. And indeed this document seem to be a fairly complete technical explanation of how Z39.50 works, down to the level of all the ASN.1. So, it's covering the material found at LoC. Actually, the presentation looks better organized than the official one (if you're fluent in Chinese, which I'm not).

NBINet is a Z39.50 Gateway, a web site that lets you run queries against supported libraries. It runs a Z39.50 Client in its HTTP Server. So, it's like LoC Z39.50 Gateway, but for Taiwan. Some of the servers it in turn queries look like they might be relevant, if we can figure out how it connects, and if those connections are open (and not restricted to the NBINet client via password, IP filtering, etc.). 臺大圖書館 = University of Taiwan Library; 中央研究院 = Academica Sinica (LoC supports this one too); 臺中圖書館 = Taichung (public?) Library.

http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2005/chi/Presentation-PDF/008-Bau%20Mei%20Cheng.pdf doesn't seem to be accessible to me right now. I'll try to remember to look later.

Update based on list here:

Library Host Port Database Format Encoding
University of Taiwan tulips.ntu.edu.tw 210 INNOPAC MARC21 CCCII?
Academica Sinica las.sinica.edu.tw 210 INNOPAC MARC21 CCCII?
Taichung lib.ptl.edu.tw 210 ptlchinese MARC21 BIG5?

I'm not fluent, either, and you figured out more than I did. I'll see if I can find someone who can help. My simplified Chinese is even weaker, I hope someone else can help there.

I don't have any suggestions for new servers - but I do suggest that somebody removes "Union Catalogue of Finnish University Libraries (LINDA)" from the list. It's not working, and it's not going to ever start working - it's private, and you'd have to pay for the access.

...
Actually, Fennica might be worth adding - if it's not already there. I'm not quite sure which service "Finnish University Libraries (Linnea)" uses: Fennica, Linda, Helga, Arto, Manda, etc. are all part of Linnea, but there's no way to search for whole Linnea at once.

Anyway...

FENNICA - The National Bibliography of Finland
Domain name: 193.166.7.194
Port: 11390 and 11391 (see Present Service)
Database name: Voyager
Availability: 24 hours/day; 7 days/week, except for
about 10 minutes daily unavailability
from 21:30 to 21:40 (GMT-2) caused by
routine maintenance.

Present Service

Record Syntaxes and Character Sets Supported
- port xx90
* MARC21 MARC-8 (OID = 1.2.840.10003.5.10)
* MARC21-Fin MARC-8 (OID = 1.2.840.10003.5.32)
* OPAC (OID = 1.2.840.10003.5.102)
- port xx91
* FINMARC ISO6937/2 (OID = 1.2.840.10003.5.15)
* MARC21 UTF-8 (OID = 1.2.840.10003.5.10)
* MARC21-Fin UTF-8 (OID = 1.2.840.10003.5.32)

I'm working on this. Just found and added 20 libraries, including some new language coverage, but it's not "exposed" to you yet. I need to run my battery of Polish and Czech searches to make sure there are quirks in their character sets. I got them off the first link MMcM posted. I'll explore the others too.

I also have been working hard on this, and I've been using a list of servers as well for testing different scenarios: http://targettest.indexdata.com/

Personally, I have yet to find a more comprehensive target list, but I also didn't spend tooooo much time looking.

-c-

Well, Chris, this is where we need to put our heads together. I've certainly done THAT part of it.

T

indexdata.com directory is quite comprehensive, but it still misses both NL of Korea and NAL of Korea I posted earlier. I hope they don't get neglected just because it doesn't appear on the directory.

Not a new language, but over in the Blog someone had suggested adding the OhioLINK library consortia. At a meeting of this consortia I spoke to their head programmer enquiring whether they would have any problem (server load, etc.) with being added, and the response was, essentially, that they have a public Z39.50 access, so it shouldn't be a problem.

The OhioLINK consortia includes nearly every public and private college and university library in Ohio, plus the State Library of Ohio, and two public library system (Cuyahoga County Public Libraries and Westerville Public Libraries). Thus, it has a very broad collection with at least 85 member catalogs representing 9.8 million unique records (over 45 million items).

Is there anyone at LibraryThing I could talk to in order to get this consortium added as a source?

wademlee

Um, me. I'll look at it.

yeah, thought it might be you, Tim. :-) Thanks! I think it'd be a useful addition in terms of having good, clean records and serving a variety of collections.

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=3391 Has pointers to some more libraries.

Thanks for the lists.

Might I suggest using the University of British Columbia Library ( the second largest research library in Canada ) instead of the University of Calgary Library?

http://www.library.ubc.ca/libsys/z3950.html

A library from the Seattle area would be wonderful too, the US sources on the western side of the continent are rather thin at the moment, at least the last time I checked.

for a list of Z39.50 targets in the UK, see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/zdir/

Since I have several books published by the University of Alberta Press, I feel compelled to suggest adding the University of Alberta Libraries. : )

http://www.library.ualberta.ca/z39.50/

Hey. I need to revisit this thread more generally to see what else I can add, but Alberta and British Columbia were easy to add, so I did. Beefs up Canada nicely.

Thanks Tim!

Wow, talk about service!

Thanks Tim. They will really come in handy when I enter the rest of my CanLit shelves. : )

Topic requesting Spanish.

Information from here:

Library: Biblioteca Nacional de España
Host: 193.146.129.43
Port: 2210
Database: BIMO / BIMA
Format: IBERMARC
Encoding: 8859-1

(Why has Talk taken to filtering out <table>?)

Here you'll find a relation of spanish Z39.50 servers:
http://absysnet.com/recursos/recz3950e.html#Otros

Here's another, just this time it's provided by the Culture Ministry:
http://travesia.mcu.es/z3950.asp

Here is a list of servers others have found: http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=13683

My topic requesting a Hungarian library, with links.

Someone recommended it to me that I should write Tim e-mail, but I don't feel good about pestering him - he's busy enough as it is, and he reads Talk, and this topic is a good location for collecting all possible Z39.50 servers.

From another topic Tim said "We have, however recently secured—that is, licensed—access to the British Library and a large number of other libraries."

So it looks as though Tim and the guys are doing some work in this area so an email might work best as it could just get bundled up in the new set of libraries.

From the OSK library it seems as though it would be one of those libraries where Tim would have to license access in the same way.

A few messages requesting New Zealand libraries from the NZ Thingamabrarians group. There’s a complete list at http://wiki.lianza.org.nz/index.php/Resources/Z3950ConnectionInformation but the National Library of New Zealand would be the most useful for adding NZ published books that aren’t anywhere else; see my catalogue for examples.

So, I see that there is some on-going work on this. PITA for Tim and his work, mind you. Wouldn´t it just be better to cut some corners and you guys add the feature that the users can add their own Z39.50 servers? Some sort of:

¨if you want to use your specific server, paste the link¨

And then if it doesn´t work, well,it doesn´t work.

Other than that, how is it going in adding the servers that have been mentioned in this thread?

Sergio

abrego: I believe it's more involved than a mere link paste.

infiniteletters, abrego:
The Hungarian libraries I checked out have pages upon pages of info on just how to set up access to their Z39.50 server, so it's probably NOT easy. *sigh*

andyl:
access is supposed to be free AFAIK, I guess generous govt subsidy helps ;) Hungary is nice in this respect, there is also a huge heap of the finest contemporary(!) Hungarian literature available online completely free of charge (and yes, this is completely legal and funded by the government) - alas, only in Hungarian! :P

There is a topic on requesting hungarian library searches. Here's a cross-library server (i guess):

Library: Magyar Országos Közös Katalógus
Host: z3950.mokka.hu
Port: 210
Database: MOKKA
Format: HUNMARC/USMARC
Encoding: UTF-8/8859-2

the above is a hungarian database containing many national and university libraries. I guess many users would be glad if it was possible to add it.
I could also help in testing.

It would really help us Finnish LibraryThingers if there were more Finnish libraries. There is only one now. I found a web page where there is information about Z39.50 servers of libraries, among them Helka - the joint database of the Helsinki University libraries and the National Library of Finland.
http://targettest.indexdata.com/full.html?id=Z39.50%3A193.166.7.193%3A7590%2Fvoy...

The reliability doesn't look great (only 11%), but the database is the largest library database in Finland.

As far as I can tell, my www.z-brary.com is the most comprehensive and accurate registry of z39.50 targets. It is updated constantly with new and updated entries.