SRW and Z39.50: Online Search
One valuable feature in Endnote is the ability to search online library databases and download records almost as easily as doing a local search. Open source projects that look to provide reasonable alternatives to commercial applications need to provide such functionality.
Endnote’s functionality is based on the z39.50 protocol, and its server configuration files (there are thousands of them) are proprietary.
Thankfully, there’s a new standard that’s emerged that will ultimately supplant z39.50. It’s called SRW, and is built around XML. Not only does it retrieve XML records such as MODS, but it uses XML configuration files based on a standard called ZeeReX (my understanding is ZeeRex can be used with z39.50 too). It also has a purpose-built query language called CQL.
See also ZOOM.
I don’t understand the details of all of this, but at the OOoBib project, Rob Sanderson made a convincing argument awhile back not only to use this technology for remote searches, but to built the entire query code—including for local resources—around it. I find this quite intriguing myself. It seems fully consistent with the Bibliophile project’s interest in cross-database searching,
