Bookpedia > asian z39.50 servers

[azastorr]

I can't find out how to use chinese language z39.50 servers. I read others posts on the forum about z39.50 servers and thouroughly Bookpedia help instruction with no success.

I tried those servers (info available on http://targettest.indexdata.com) :

1) Academica Sinica
2) National Cheng Chi University, Taiwan
3) National Central Library, Taiwan
4) National University of Singapore
5) Hong Kong Baptist University

trying every encoding and format possible. While chinese language books information cannot be retrieved whatever keyword (ISBN, author, title, etc.) I specify, latin alphabet books (english, french, etc.) information when retrived looks like random code making impossible to read it.

We're a lot here who would like to use Bookpedia for searching chinese language information :-J

Thank you verymuch for developing such a great application.

[Conor]

I did a couple of searches, in English so it might not mean much, and the settings where as follows:

• 1) server: "las.sinica.edu.tw:210/INNOPAC" USmarc UTF8
  2) server: "jenda.lib.nccu.edu.tw:210/INNOPAC" USmarc Latin1
  3) server: "nbinet.ncl.edu.tw:210/INNOPAC" USmarc Latin1 (I did get a number of unknown entries that are probably in chinese and the z39.50 server encoding is unable to understand).

I been meaning to update the z39.50 feature to be easier to use. I will add a couple of these server to the test suite, to see if I can include the encoding that will make chinese searches possible. If you could provide me with a Chinese character to search for that would be a good test case that would be appreciated. For example "love" is good in English as it appears in many book titles.

[azastorr]

Sure, here are some for the subjects and titles search: 中國(China), æ„›(love), å

[Zevlag]

I'm a native english speaker/reader. But I've learned Mandarin Chinese, and acquired a number of Chinese books. I'm a but curious on how exactly to add /use these servers.

The default set of servers doesn't find records for the ISBN I type, or the chinese character titles.

[azastorr]

Well, it seems Chinese isn't supported for the moment...

[Zevlag]

Conor,

How can we help you make this work right?

[caorongjin]

Hi there,

Just resurrecting this one again. I migrated from Delicious Library to Bookpedia today and am fairly happy with it so far… but my library of Chinese languages books are not importing all that much better than it did on Delicious Library. What needs to be done for the Chinese z39.50 servers to work? How can I help?

P.S. I am a programmer, though much more experienced in Java than Objective C.

Alex

[Conor]

The z39.50 is an old technology so, it's not great when it comes to non ASCII characters and cross platform support. I retested the above z39.50 server mentioned above but this time got no results, so it could be it's currently not online. I'll take a look around and see if I can find another z39.50 server that would work with Bookpedia. Do try out the new Google Books search in Bookpedia that might have Chinese books.

If you have some programming experience you can take a look at creating a plugin for a good data source of Chinese books, by reading their web page.

[caorongjin]

I tried using the Academia Sinica server as well as adding the Chinese University of Hong Kong servers, and both of them gave me garbled text. So, just setting the encodings for the servers doesn't work I guess? For the CUHK, the MARC data looked fine -- from the browser, of course.

The Google Books search does work pretty well, but I still have to manually input about 25% of my books… which is quite painful. Have you thought about a Worldcat.org plugin? That database is very comprehensive.

If I can get together some time, I will try to put together a plugin to do some screen scraping, like you suggest. Thanks.