Profile Specifications
Functional Area A: Basic Bibliographic Search and Retrieval in Online Library Catalogs
This Functional Area specifies three levels of conformance for Z39.50 clients and servers. Each level is based on the specifications from the Bath Profile. Differences that may exist between the U.S. National and the Bath Profiles are indicated by noting Bath and U.S. specifications, BL and US respectively. This page addresses Level 0 requirements.
Level 0: Search and Retrieval Requirements
Level 0 defines basic search and retrieval requirements for Z39.50 clients and services. Z39.50 Version 2 is required; Z39.50 Version 3 is recommended.
Level 0 Search Requirements
Level 0 Searching requires the ISO Latin-1 character set (ISO 8859-1).
Level 0 searching requires the following bib-1 Attributes Types and Values:
Attribute Type Attribute Values Attribute Names Use (1) 4, 21, 1003, 1016 title, subject heading, author, any Relation (2) 3 equal Position (3) 3 any position in field Structure (4) 2, 101 word, normalized Truncation (5) 100 do not truncate Completeness (6) 1 incomplete subfield
Combinations of these Attributes Types and Values express the semantics of five Level 0 searches:
BL0.1. Author Search — Precision Match for Established Name Heading
US0.1. Author Search — Keyword [Note: This is a Bath Profile Level 1 search]
BL0.2. Title Search — Keyword
BL0.3. Subject Search — Keyword
BL0.4. Any Search — Keyword
The following list contains the specifications for expressing these searches.
BL0.1. Author Search — Precision Match for Established Name Heading
Use: Searches for complete word(s), as ordered in the query, in fields that contain a name of a person or entity responsible for a resource. The search term may appear anywhere in the field as long as the order is preserved. Makes no assumption about whether the search term is in an authorized or unauthorized form (i.e., makes no attempt to reprocess the term before attempting a match against the specified indexes that contain names in authorized form that may have been established according to cataloging rules such as AACR2 ). Example: the search term "aardt, j" will retrieve resources indexed "Aardt, J", "Aardt J.H.A.", and "Van Aardt, J." but not "Aardt, Jan." Z-clients should formulate this search using the comma to separate surname and firstname (e.g., aardt, j).
Attribute Type Attribute Values Attribute Names Use (1) 1003 author Relation (2) 3 equal Position (3) 3 any position in field Structure (4) 101 normalized Truncation (5) 100 do not truncate Completeness (6) 1 incomplete subfield
[NOTE: There will be some additional wording in the Use section to be provided by Larry Dixson to help clarify the use of this search.]
US0.1. Author Search — Keyword [Note: This is a Bath Profile Level 1 search]
Use: Searches for complete word in fields that contain the name of a person or entity responsible for a resource.
Attribute Type Attribute Values Attribute Names Use (1) 1003 author Relation (2) 3 equal Position (3) 3 any position in field Structure (4) 2 word Truncation (5) 100 do not truncate Completeness (6) 1 incomplete subfield
BL0.2. Title Search — Keyword
Use: Searches for complete word in a title of a resource.
Attribute Type Attribute Values Attribute Names Use (1) 4 title Relation (2) 3 equal Position (3) 3 any position in field Structure (4) 2 word Truncation (5) 100 do not truncate Completeness (6) 1 incomplete subfield
BL0.3. Subject Search — Keyword
Use: Searches for complete word in subject fields in a record.
Attribute Type Attribute Values Attribute Name Use (1) 21 subject heading Relation (2) 3 equal Position (3) 3 any position in field Structure (4) 2 word Truncation (5) 100 do not truncate Completeness (6) 1 incomplete subfield
BL0.4. Any Search — Keyword
Use: Searches for complete word in fields that are commonly used as access points (as defined by the server). Any searches comprising more than one keyword are interpreted in such a way that the terms may exist in the same or different attributes.
Example: a search on "Dickens AND Twist" might conceivably find "Dickens" in the Author Use Attribute (1003) and "Twist" in the Title Use Attribute (4).
Attribute Type Attribute Values Attribute Name Use (1) 1016 any Relation (2) 3 equal Position (3) 3 any position in field Structure (4) 2 word Truncation (5) 100 do not truncate Completeness (6) 1 incomplete subfield
Level 0 Retrieval Requirements
Level 0 Retrieval requires the support of the following record syntaxes:
Z-clients support (UNIMARC or MARC21) and SUTRS and XML.
Z-servers support (UNIMARC or MARC 21) and (SUTRS or XML).
Z-clients and Z-servers are required to support MARC 21 record syntax.
Z-clients and Z-servers will use the ASCII character set or the character set defined for use with the record syntax. For SUTRS records,
ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1)
for retrieval.
[NOTE: This is still an area of contention. An alternative to the Bath Profile specification for Level 0 Retrieval discussed by the committee is:
Z-clients to support (UNIMARC and MARC21) and XML record syntaxes .
Z-servers to support (UNIMARC or MARC 21) and XML record syntaxes.Z-servers are required to support MARC 21 record syntax.
Another possibility is that we do diverge from Bath at Level 0 and only address MARC record syntaxes. Leaving Level 1 to include SUTRS and/or XML.
For this Functional Area that focuses on online library catalogs, we will face questions about the requirement for non-MARC record syntaxes being required. Responsibility for interoperability rests with the Z-client since it is required to support both record syntaxes.]
Where we include XML, we will need to specify an associated DTD. Several options will be suggested at the April meeting.
[Date Page Last Revised: March 26, 2001 ]