Content area
Full text
Keywords
Catalogues, Libraries, Internet, Computer languages,
Client-server computing
Abstract
This article details the development of an experimental XML-- based online library catalog. The emerging technology of XML, and its early implementation in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, allowed for the development of an application employing the client-side processing of XML with JavaScript. But slow implementation of XML by other browser vendors, and a tendency towards the slow adoption of the newest browser versions by users, demanded an application employing server-side processing of the XML. Now in its third version, XMLCat demonstrates the viability of this approach, and points to possibilities for its future development.
The genesis of the XMLCat Library Catalog began in the Spring of 1999 when I was Librarian at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. I was using Inmagic DB/ Textworks to maintain the library's online catalog and wanted to place it on the Web, both as a convenience to patrons, and as a way to cut down on the number of phone inquiries. Although Inmagic has very good software (WebPublisher) for placing databases (or textbases as they call them) on the Web, the more than $5,000 price tag was beyond the meager budget of my little library. And as I discovered on the Inmagic listserv, there were plenty of smaller libraries in the same situation as mine.
I wanted, therefore, to come up with a low-- cost solution (or no-cost, other than my time), that would not require a great deal of programming expertise, and what I knew of the emerging XML standard seemed like it might provide the answer. I had seen from my experience encoding texts in TEI-Lite (an SGML application), and using Softquad's Panorama software, an SGML publisher/ viewer, that encoding text in this fashion makes them highly searchable. I had observed that documents marked up in SGML - and by extension XML, a simplified version of SGML for the Web - with its highly hierarchical data structures, were analogous to relational databases, although seeming to contain far richer possibilities. All that were required to mine the wealth of data contained in these documents were adequate software tools.
The development of XMI.Cat: client-side version
In the Spring of 1999, Microsoft had just released...