import authority records from Z39.50

[Galen Charlton]

Some Z39.50 targets, notably including the NAF and SAF databases from the Library of Congress, return MARC authority records. It would be useful if Evergreen were capable of importing authority records from Z39.50.

A couple possible workflows include:

[1] Providing a search for to directly search for authority records and import them.
[2] Automatically importing and linking relevant authority records from the bib MARC editor.

Most of the Z39.50 infrastructure is in place, but changes needed would include:

- using search attributes relevant to the authority databases
- display the authority record's main heading in the results lists appropriately
- avoiding the import of duplicate authority records

[Linda Jansova (skolkova-s)]

Actually, we asked about this feature back in 2015, so perhaps this thread in which Dan Scott chimed in with his suggestions might be useful: http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/open-ils-general/2015-March/011440.html.

The ability to download individual authority records via Z39.50 would definitely be useful for us in the Czech Republic even now (nine years after we sent our initial question to the open-ils-general mailing list) as otherwise we have to import all authorities (or most of them) in bulk; this obviously means that the database size can significantly (and a bit unnecessarily) increase and consequently the backup files are also rather big in size etc.