Go4zgate Gateway: Using 
                             ZDist and Isite

                            Neophytos Iacovou

     Last year we implemented a Gopher to Z39.50 gateway using CNIDR's
	 fw101 package. Since then CNIDR has switched its focus away from
	 fw101 and towards Zdist and Isite. We have updated Go4zgate to
	 reflect this move. At the same time we added some features of our
	 own. This paper describes Go4zgate - a gopher to Z39.50 gateway.

	                           June 9, 1995


1.0	Introduction

At the moment a student can access the University of Min-
nesota's library system by either: walking up to any one of 
the public access terminals found in every library on cam-
pus; or they can open a telnet/TN3270 session to the 
libraries's mainframes. In either case the result is the 
same, the student is greeted with a what can only be 
described as "clunky" user-interface. 

The University of Minnesota library system has embraced 
Z39.50 and is beginning to move away from its current 
mainframe/terminal architecture to a client/server archi-
tecture. As this transition occurs the opportunity to give 
the students a better user-interface exists.

Z39.50 is a NISO standard; its official name is "Informa-
tion Retrieval Application Service Definition and Protocol 
Specification". In April of 1995 a new version of the pro-
tocol was agreed on.

A Gopher to Z39.50 version 2 gateway (Go4zgate) was 
developed in order to allow students to access the various 
Z39.50 databases currently available. At the present time 
these databases are generally on-line library catalogs, but 
as more and more people become familiar with Z39.50 the 
expected number of available Z39.50 servers will 
increase.

The rest of this paper describes Go4zgate and how it can 
be used to access on-line library catalogs.




2.0	Why Use Go4zgate?

The benefits of accessing Z39.50 library catalogs via 
Go4zgate are: