"Seaman, Graham" <Graham.Seaman@rhul.ac.uk>
Owen Leonard wrote:
Z39.50 cannot return availability information for items. That's one of the reasons why projects like FulfILLment (http://fulfillment-ill.org/) exist. ILSes need some kind of separate layer between them to exchange that kind of data.
I don't think that's exactly true. Z39.50 servers generally give you a choice of MARC 21, SUTRS, XML or OPAC format, where OPAC format includes holdings/circulation data appended to the bibliographic record. Several proprietary ILS systems (eg ExLibris Aleph or Sirsi-Dynix Horizon) support this format.
As you know, holdings data is not necessarily availability data. Happily, Koha will return holdings data in the 952 tag described on http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Holdings_data_fields_(9xx) including the due date in the q subfield if it's on loan. I checked and this still seems to be visible in a Zebra z39.50 connected to a recent master version. However, it's only useful if you know you're talking to Koha. In general, what Owen said is correct and we don't get availability. Hope that helps, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/