[Koha] z39.50 and holdings

[MJ Ray]

"Seaman, Graham" <Graham.Seaman at 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
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