On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:31:49 +0900, Sam Roberts <sroberts / uniserve.com> wrote:
> Quoting lrz / gnome.org, on Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 06:10:19AM +0900:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am happy to announce the first release of Ruby/ZOOM!
> >
> > Ruby/ZOOM provides a Ruby binding to the Z39.50 Object-Orientation Model
> > (ZOOM), an abstract object-oriented programming interface to a subset of
> > the services specified by the Z39.50 standard, also known as the
> > international standard ISO 23950.
> 
> Ok, I've gone through about 3 web pages, and I still don't know what
> kind of info you can access with Z39.50. Could you give a few line
> summary of what kinds of things I can do with this?
> 

Z39.50 is mainly used for book information retrieval.  For instance,
the US Library of Congress has a Z39.50 open server.  The French
National Library too.  A lot of national libraries do provide a Z39.50
access to the public.

I am not an expert on this, I just want to support more libraries in
my book collection manager :)  Someone can correct what I said.

Laurent