New, Free Metadata Harvesting Package

Hello,

 

I’m posting this announcement here, because I use YAZ for the part of the package that retrieves data from Z39.50 servers, and  I thought it might be of interest to some subscribers.  I hope this is alright.

 

Laurence Finston

 

 

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Hello,

 

I'd like to announce the publication of the IWF Metadata Harvester.

 

This package reads data from servers, writes it to databases,

implements various kinds of searches, and writes HTML files to display

the results. It currently handles data from two kinds of interface:

OAI (Open Archives Initiative), which provides XML, and Z39.50, using

the Pica format. 

 

The IWF Metadata Harvester is Free Software.  The program code is

published under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and the

documentation under those of the GNU Free Documentation License.

It is available from the following FTP server:

http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/gnu2/iwfmdh/

I am currently looking into the possibility of having the package

hosted on a website for software developers.

 

The IWF Metadata Harvester has been developed on a system running

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and using Visual Studio, Visual C++ .NET

and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. ; However, I have tried to make it as

portable as possible under the circumstances by avoiding the ATL

and MFC types, classes, etc., as much as I could.  However, it has not

been possible to do without them completely. ; More recent code uses

them less. ; I hope that it will be possible to use the files of SQL

code with free database packages without too many alterations.  I plan

to port the package to GNU/Linux myself at the earliest opportunity.

 

I have used Donald Knuth and Silvio Levy's CWEB package for the C++

code, so that pretty-printed versions of the programs are included in

the package:

http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/gnu2/iwfmdh/doc

This directory also contains the manual, which has been written using

the Texinfo package.  It is available in the following formats:

DVI, PostScript, PDF, and HTML.

 

Because the IWF Metadata Harvester is Free Software, libraries,

archives, or any other providers of metadata could make it available to

users with no purchase, registration, special license arrangements, or

(subject to local laws) liability.

 

The IWF Metadata Harvester is a work-in-progress.  I would be very

interested to know whether any libraries, archives, other

institutions, businesses, or private persons would find it useful. 

 

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

 

Laurence Finston

 

IWF Wissen und Medien gGmbH

Nonnenstieg 72

37075 Goettingen

Germany

 

 

 

 

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