[Koha] Z39.50client wont give up searching

[baljkas at mb.sympatico.ca]

Monday, January 5, 2004    23:34 CST

Hey MJ,

>[snip]
>How many Z39.50 servers do most people use? Is it impossible to write 
>an asynchronous CGI?

Actually, that depends on one's collection. Many find everything they need
at LC. My last gig as a cataloguer, I used NLC, LC, the Australian National
Library, Oxford, the NEOS Library Consortium (in Alberta, Canada) and
several University of California libraries (in descending order).

A parallel search (MAPLIN Global) available through the provincial library
services government here in Manitoba allowed me to search up to 8 libraries
at once.

And that reminds me ...

I remember the head of PLS writing in to the listserv before, in
consideration of Koha for the provincial system. Perhaps the (as I was
told) proprietary code that drives the MAPLIN search engine could be shared
with Koha? That would certainly be advantageous.

>> if you setup your webserver timeout low (something like 10 seconds) 
>> the daemon becomes mandatory.
>
>If you set your timeout that low, I think you are likely to have worse 
>problems unless you have a fast machine. The CGI could just return 
>whatever answers come back in <10 seconds. Is it reasonable to use the 
>daemon by default just to give better support to odd setups?

Definitely reasonable. I've never had a search return in 10 seconds. I only
wish. My computer at home has a faster Internet connection than the one I
used last working as a cataloguer (for DND), but I think, at best, maybe 25
seconds is the best time I've achieved with NLC (faster for my local WPL
and PLS).

Two minutes is definitely a fair time-out. For people working at
cataloguing, it becomes a matter of wasting too much time searching: if it
takes more than a few minutes to locate a record and/or check several 
libraries (x 2 minutes each time) it may end up being faster (if not more
accurate) to recode from scratch.

Still, having the ability to set the time would be nice (especially for
Transatlantic and Transpacific searching) although 2 minutes as a default
time would still seem very reasonable to me.

Happy New Year to Koha-ites near and far,
Cheers,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Winnipeg, MB, Canada