Distributed OPAC System Using Z39.50 Protocol

Chandramohan Reddy Y,Madhuri K

doi:10.24297/ijct.v10i5.4150

Abstract

Online Public Access Catalogue is playing a vital role in Central Libraries and University/College Libraries. Most of the College libraries are using OPAC for easy search and retrieval of the books and it's Status in a Particular Library. The main limitation in the OPAC we are using in current system is; that we are able to search and retrieve the information about the books of that particular library, but not outside of it. When we have a scenario like if we have multiple libraries in a campus, if we need to search a book in all the libraries, we have only two possibilities to build OPAC, once to make the single database for all the Libraries or you need to ask the user to search in all OPAC Systems of respective Library manually. But both above solutions are not feasible in real time environment. So in order to have the above scenario a feasible solution we need to build a distributed environment for the OPAC, which will have all the individual databases connected remotely.

Highlights

The Concept of Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) is already implemented in many Libraries with single databases or multiple databases with in the same server
The Concept of OPAC is already implemented in many Libraries with single databases or multiple databases with in the same server
The 3rd generation OPACs incorporates features that are characterized by the facilities of World Wide Web (WWW)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The Concept of OPAC is already implemented in many Libraries with single databases or multiple databases with in the same server. In order to use Distributed databases to interact with Client (OPAC interface) and Server (databases) in remote we need to have proper Communication Channel. We are going to use Z39.50 Protocol, which is a powerful communication tool based on client-server interaction (search interface to the catalogue and other resources on the net). The Library of Congress has defined the online catalogue as: An online catalogue is an access tool and resources guide to the collections of a library or libraries, which contains interrelated sets of bibliographic data in machine-readable form and, which can be searched interactively on a terminal by users (Fayen, 1983, p 4). The National Library of Medicine’s definition is as follows: An online catalogue provides online access to the complete bibliographic record of all of the library’s holdings with minimal access points being the same as those available in a card catalogue This reduces the processing time and increases the query execution speed showing the response back to the user in no time

User attitudes and behavior

OPAC input from users

OPAC output