zetoc: a Dublin Core Based Current Awareness Service

Abstract

zetoc is a current awareness service for UK Higher and Further Education providing Z39.50 access to the British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents database of journal articles and conference papers. The zetoc database, updated daily, may also be searched via a World Wide Web interface. An alerting service provides tables of contents by email for new journal issues when they are loaded. The current version of zetoc is Z39.50 Bath Profile compliant and can provide Dublin Core records encoded in XML in answer to Z39.50 search requests. An enhanced version of zetoc, currently a prototype under development, will hold the data within an XML repository, using Dublin Core as the basis of the metadata schema. This paper describes the encoding of bibliographic records for journal articles and conference papers in Dublin Core, and the interoperability between Dublin Core and other bibliographic standards.