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This is the third in a series of reviews of Z39.50 client software by the author. In previous articles, the author has reviewed Book Where Pro from Seachange Corporation and Vizion from Sirsi Corporation. This article reviews WinWllow used as a Z39.50 client.
In this article, I continue my reviews of Z39.50 clients by looking at some aspects of WinWillow, the implementation of the University of Washington's Willow for Microsoft Windows. Willow, an acronym for Washington Information Looker-Upper Layered Over Windows, is developed jointly by the University of Washington Computing and Communications and the University of Washington Libraries, with contributions from MIT and other organizations. Willow, originally written as an X-Window application, has been available for the UNIX world for quite some time, but only relatively recently have clients been developed that will work with the Microsoft Windows environment.
WinWillow differs significantly from other Z39.50' clients I have reviewed. First, technically WinWillow is not simply a Z39.50 client. It is a user interface that can be used with many different types of databases. WinWillow can be used with Z39.50 databases, and that is the perspective from which I examine it here, but it can also be used with databases that do not conform to the Z39.50 standard. This is due to a second major difference. WinWillow uses a Unix-based database driver, which provides all the configuration information it needs to work with a given database. The database driver must reside on a UNIX host with which WinWillow communicates via hypertext transfer protocol (http). The database driver acts as an intermediary between the client software and the host database. Unlike the two-way conversation between other Z39.50 clients and a Z39.50 server, the conversation here is a three-way conversation.
There are distinct, real advantages to the design strategy on which WinWillow is based. First and most important, it can further facilitate the kind of consistency that enables users to spend time actually using an application, rather than learning how to use it. The user interface can remain essentially the same for a very wide range of heterogeneous database hosts, including both those that do and those that do not comply with the Z39.50 standard.
The Z39.50 standard itself specifies a consistent protocol that allows heterogeneous...