use of LDAP for query

At 06:29 AM 12/9/98 PST, LeVan,Ralph wrote:
>> From: Jim Davis [mailto:jdavis@parc.xerox.com]
>> I think it's also reasonable to consider, from the library 
>> point of view,
>> whether LDAP might work as well as DASL.  Do you have any 
>> thoughts on that?
>
>I can't really believe you made that suggestion.  The objections that the
>Web community has consistently expressed about Z39.50 are it's statefulness,
>binary encoding and transmission over raw tcp/ip.  LDAP has all those
>deficiencies.  In addition, it has a really weak searching mechanism.

Thanks.  It's good to get input from a librarian's perspective. 

FWIW, the Isaac project
(http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/research/rfp/IssacCall.html) is using LDAP
for metadata search.  I don't know why they picked LDAP, (except that
probably they started before DASL was proposed, and they have working code
now), but it seemd to me possible that to a librarian there might be other
factors I had not considered.