isbnsearch Z39.50 server verification process

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Introduction

The main isbnsearch package is now mature and needs only small enhancements and bug fixes. The isbnsearch-devel package, by comparison, is in continued development and files and structures are likely to continue to change considerably over the next few releases. The aim is to increase the automation of the server update, verification and reporting process.

Note: You will need to install Net::Z3950 and YAZ, as described in the main package documentation, before you can verify Z39.50 servers using the isbnsearch-devel package. MARC is not required.

The automated scripts rely on simple GNU/Linux utilities; namely wget, diff, grep and cut. The scripts were written for the bash shell and Perl 5.8.1 using the DBI and Socket modules. MySQL is required for the database operations, although other Perl-compatible SQL based databases should also work. Perl scripts that use DBI need to be configured with the host, user, password and database name before the verification can begin. The scripts rely on being able to write to the current working directory to create a ./tmp/ folder and to write and delete files in that folder.

The current package documentation is split into two sections that describe the varying levels of automation achieved so far:

Preparation

Describes the preparation scripts that obtain updated listings from the LoC Gateway and Net::Z3950::AsyncZ server listings, removes duplicates and canonical names without a DNS listing and generates a single MySQL table to hold verification data.

Verification

Describes the verification run using verify.pl and how the server result reports are created.

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