ANN: New prerelease with SRU support

Hi,

in an attempt to make RefDB more compliant with emerging standards
from the Library of Congress, especially SRU and MODS, I've extended
RefDB quite a bit. As the changes are more substantial than between
the usual prereleases, there is a separate document which explains
some background, the installation, and the basics of the usage:

http://refdb.sourceforge.net/sru.html

In brief, SRU is a method to query or browse library catalogs or
reference databases by sending specially crafted URLs. These URLs
strictly follow the HTTP conventions. You can simply type them into a
web browser, or use some piece of software that assembles and sends
the URLs. RefDB implements the SRU service as a CGI script which you
can install in your web server. The script acts as a proxy server and
retrieves the bibliographic data from your RefDB application
server. The results are formatted as a XML document as explained in
the SRU spec and sent back to the browser. The default format of
bibliographic data in SRU is MODS which refdbd is now able to
generate.

It is important to note that SRU is not meant to replace a graphical
web interface (expecially not the PHP based one that some members of
this list are busy developing). Instead, it is a means to retrieve
XML-based information from your RefDB databases via a standardized
protocol which can be used both from web browsers and from
bibliographic software.

The full list of changes is appended below. I'd greatly appreciate if
you could spend some time testing this new prerelease. As the changes
to implement SRU support are fairly complex, I'm sure that I'll have
to iron out a bunch of wrinkles before SRU support can appear in a
regular release. I'd also appreciate if you could test the new MODS
export (which of course is also available in getref - use the -t mods
switch) with your own reference data. I've found quite a few cases
where I disagree with how bibutils
(http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/) handle the
RIS->MODS conversion, so I'd be interested to hear whether the RefDB
MODS backend or whether bibutils should be changed.

regards,
Markus

Changes in 0.9.8-sru1

- the new refdbc:countref and refdbc:countnote commands are equivalent
  to the getref and getnote commands, respectively, except that they
  do not actually retrieve the reference or note data. Instead, they
  return the number of matching references and notes, respectively.

- the query language supports additional relational operators: <=
  (less than or equal), >= (larger than or equal), <> (not like).

- there is a new backend for MODS output, an XML format maintained by
  the Library of Congress.

- the XML output (risx, mods, xnote) now supports namespaces.

- the -n switch of getbib is no longer supported (it was hardly ever
  used anyway). refdbd now sends a stylespec no matter what.

- the getnote/countnote commands now also support query strings of
  unlimited length, just like the getref/countref commands.

- the adduser/deleteuser commands now support two classes of users:
  read-only users and read/write-users. The former is a simple way to
  generate a database account for users accessing your databases through
  SRU or via the web interface without permitting write access to
  your databases for everyone.

- the new CGI script refdbsru provides an optional SRU (Search and
  Retrieve via URL) interface to your databases.


-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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