The international community of librarians has been promoting technological innovation since 1988. Following the indications of the US
Library of Congress (LOC), libraries adopted communication protocols in order to interrogate the bibliographic catalogues available online. Among them, the most widespread is the
Z39.50 protocol, that allows client applications to interrogate a database residing on a remote server, regardless of the data management system adopted by the single library. Thanks to this protocol, it is possible to develop web applications able to interrogate multiple catalogues simultaneously.
The Z39.50 protocol is an
ANSI/NISO (American National Standards Institute, National Information Standards Organization) and
ISO 23950 standard, managed by the
Library of Congress.