Sonny Software

Has anybody of you made import filters for the DDB (Die Deutsche Bibliothek, which is the German National Bibliography). Informations about the Z39.50 Gateway can be found here:

http://www.ddb.de/service/zd/z39_50.htm

Another important catalog is the SWB (Südwestdeutscher Bibliotheksverbund), which contains lots of University Libraries and a few state libraries in Southwestern Germany.

http://titan.bsz-bw.de/cms/service/swb/z3950/lite

If somebody has already done the filters, it would be great you would share it. It also would be great if these boths catalogs very added to Bookends by default.

The last time I checked (several months ago) access to the DDB was restricted somehow, which lessened my motivation to build an import filter tremendously. However, I think they might be more accessible by now. (They should - I think it's a huge scandal that they aren't!)

If you whip up something be sure to post it here / send it to Jon. I am sure many people would use it if the access is more liberal by now.

So far, I did not invest any work in the SWB and haven't heard from anyone else who would…

Jon, is there a chance that these libraries will be placed in one of the next updates?

I haven't looked into it. Reiner, why not just make the filter yourself? Make a New filter based on one of the existing German library filters and rename it to the new library. The settings in the Internet tab are all you probably need to change to get it to work -- it should be pretty obvious from inspection what you need to do.

If you make the filter, please send it to me and I'll include it in the next release.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon,

I tried it for SWB but does not get any other result than "There are no matches". Could you give me a hint what this means?

Or would anybody have a look at http://titan.bsz-bw.de/cms/service/swb/ ... target.pdf and perhaps be more successful than me?

btw: the built-in German filter for HeBIS also only creates the "There are no matches"-dialog.

yours, reiner

edit: I'm also not able to create a working filter for DDB, the error message I got here is: "Error[114]: Use attribute value (i.e., index type) is not supported by target system."

I can't find any information about this in the user guide.

Strange, the HeBIS is indeed not working anymore. I'll look into that.

ozean wrote:Strange, the HeBIS is indeed not working anymore. I'll look into that.

would you please tell me what's the problem if you found it? perhaps than I can get my SWB-filter to work too.

Well, I only had to change the database name from "hebis-inkl-aufs" to "hebis" to get it to work again. I sent an updated version of the import filter to Jon to be included in future releases.

Hi Ozean and everyone else,

I tried it for days now to get SWB and DDB to work. Maybe somebody of you could throw a look at it and will have more luck than me?

Or do you have some (german) speaking information about z39.50-filters? Very helpful would be a documentation of error messages.

best regards

Reiner, both of these sites present problems. I was able to connect to DDE, but it was pretty useless because the output isn't in a form Bookends can parse (not MARC, FULL, or BRIEF).

I could connect to SWB, it seemed, but Bookends gets back 0 hits even when SWB says there are many (e.g. searching for 'test' got 16190 hits, but 0 returned. I've seen this before, and it was some bad setting at the library end. So I suggest you contact them and as about it.

FWIW, I also tried connecting with other applications, with no success. You might try, too.

Jon
Sonny Software

I contacted SWB already one or two weeks ago and no answer so far. I contacted DDB yesterday. If I will have some new information, I will let you know.

It would be very annoying if these two catalogues were not useable with Bookends. Many libraries provide enz-files for Endnote and cap-files for Reference Manager, is there a way to use these files? If I open them with a texteditor they are not or not very good readable.

They are for EN, not Bookends, and are in a proprietary format. But as I told you, I couldn't connect to SWB from other apps, either.

Jon
Sonny Software

Now I made small improvements with the DDB, more documentation-docments will hopefully arrive in the next days. So I hope I can make a filter which can be tested by others. (I'm still not understanding lot of the things I do there )

One question I have now because I didn't find a setting for that in the import filter: All diacritics (Umlaute: ä, ö, ü, ß) are wrong in the replies I get from the database. How can this be fixed?

Thanks in advance.

It probably can't be. The LOC Gateway has problems with some library's accented character output. There is nothing to do about it except to wait until they provide Unicode support.

Jon
Sonny Software