Agent-Based Adaptive Selection and Interaction to Z39.50 Servers

Digital libraries and OPACs are offering an enormous collection of information resources which can be accessed through Internet by quite different users thanks to the existence of standard protocols for information retrieval such as Z39.50. However, some users may find difficult to get the items they are looking for in such a huge bulk of heterogeneous resources since they have to know where and how they have to search for. Thus, one of the main reasons for the disregard of the Z39.50 service has traditionally been the absence of appropriate interfaces and the cost of making alternative searches. WAY-Z39.50 tries to help spreading the use of these servers by providing easy web access to them, as well as, by facilitating the access to multiple servers at once. The prototype described implements the WAY general model based on an agent-based architecture that provides adaptive searching in different servers through an adaptive interface.