

                             Go4zgate 1.0

                  Gopher to Z39.50 Version 2 Gateway

                               for UNIX



Go4zgate is a Gopher to Z39.50 1992 Gateway.  While Gopher has had
a gateway to WAIS (an extension of the 1988 revision of Z39.50) for 
several years, Z39.50 has not been standing still. The new 1992 
revision of Z39.50 is enough different from the WAIS version of Z39.50 
that a new gateway was required. Go4zgate allows Gopher+ clients that 
support Gopher electronic forms (+ASK blocks) to submit queries to online 
catalogs (for example: MELYVL) without resporting to a telnet session. 
Since there are Gopher+ clients with forms support available for all the 
most popular platforms (Mac, PC-DOS, Windows, Unix, etc.), this should 
not be a problem.

Go4zgate is written in Perl, and so is easy to install on Unix systems. 
Because we believe that most Gopher users will want to have Gopher-style 
access to Z39.50 catalogs, we suggest that Gopher server administrators 
will probably want to run this gateway on their own machines. Obviously,
it is not feasible for all Gopher clients on the internet to use a single 
gateway at Minnesota :-).

The Go4zgate distribution includes a preconfigured list of Z39.50 catalogs,
so if you install the gateway on your system you will immediately make the
Z39.50 catalog world available to your gopher users. If you want to see an 
example of a running Go4zgate gateway, gopher to gopher.tc.umn.edu:

  Information About Gopher/Gopher+ example server/ASK block examples/Melvyl

Again, keep in mind that we cannot support the entire internet's Gopher to
Z39.50 gateway traffic, so you should run your own Go4zgate gateway as soon
as possible.

Go4zgate can be obtained via anonymous ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu:

        /pub/gopher/Unix/gopher-gateways/go4zgate


Questions, comments, praise, and bug reports should be e-mailed to the 
University of Minnesota Gopher development team at:

     gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu


The Go4zgate software  was build using components from CNIDR, UC Berkely,
and the University of Minnesota. Our thanks to:

    Kevin Gamiel - Clearinghouse for Networked Information 
                        Discovery and Retrieval
    Ray Larson   - School of Library and Information Studies, UC Berkeley
	Billy Barron - University of Texas at Dallas
    Paul Lindner - Distributed Computing Services, University of Minnesota 


