Evergreen 1.6: Z39.50 target servers for academics

UPDATE 2010-03-05 I just backported Warren's patch for sorting Z39.50 servers to rel_1_6_0 (it counts as a bug fix), so expect to see it in the Evergreen 1.6.0.4 release. Yay!

In Evergreen 1.6, Z39.50 target server configuration (for copy-cataloguing targets) moves into the database. This makes it pretty easy for sites to share their Z39.50 target servers with one another.

I recently added a number of target servers to our configuration, and thought that other academic Evergreen sites might be interested in our set (because we're primarily pointing at other academic libraries) - particularly if they haven't added many of their own yet. You can find a PostgreSQL dump of our current configuration in the ILS-Contrib repository at conifer/branches/rel_1_6_0/tools/config/config_z3950.sql.

I generated this dump of the data using the following command:

pg_dump --data-only --table config.z3950_source --table config.z3950_attr evergreen > config_z3950.sql

(where evergreen is the name of the Evergreen database, naturally!). You should be able to load the data into a clean Evergreen database via psql inside a transaction as follows:

BEGIN;\i config_z3950.sqlCOMMIT;

If you already have other Z39.50 servers in your database configuration, you might need to adjust the ID values in the config.z3950_attr rows. Just prepending a 1 to them ought to do the trick, unless you have masses of Z39.50 servers. In which case, you probably don't need ours!

Oh, one final tip: when you start adding a bunch of Z39.50 target servers, you'll notice that the order in the Import from Z39.50 screen is random; it will drive your cataloguers crazy. Quite some time ago, Warren Layton from Natural Resources Canada submitted a patch for sorting the servers alphabetically that has been committed to trunk and the 1.6 branch, but which hasn't made its way into a 1.6.0 release yet. If, at the time you're reading this, you're on a 1.6 release but your list isn't sorted, get the file and drop it into /openils/var/web/xul/server/cat/z3950.js - your cataloguers will thank you. You, in turn, can thank Warren.