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UIUC ZMARCO Project |
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UIUC ZMARCO Project |
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ZMARCO is an Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 2.0 compliant data provider. The 'Z' in ZMARCO stands for Z39.50; 'MARC' stands for MAchine-Readable Cataloging; and the 'O' stands for OAI, as in the Open Archives Inititive. Essentially ZMARCO allows MARC records which are available through a Z39.50 server to relatively easily be made available via the OAI-PMH.
The rationale for ZMARCO is that Z39.50 and MARC are fairly ubiquitous in the traditional library world, while at the same time the OAI-PMH is quickly being adopted as a light-weight protocol for the sharing of metadata within the digital library community. Therefore, it would seem useful to develop a tool that would allow the ubiquitous (but complex) Z39.50 and MARC protocols to be utilized for the creation of the OAI data providers, thereby making the huge amount of data which is already available via these older standards also available via the new OAI-PMH. This is an attempt toward that end.
The current release is version 0.2 and can be downloaded here. The README and changelog are also available.
ZMARCO is being developed as part of the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. We have other OAI tools available from SourceForge at UIUC OAI Metadata Harvesting Project and also VBZOOM. You can also refer to the the Open Archives Initiative web site.