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This article will examine the Z39.50 Information Retrieval protocol. It will look at some of the history of the protocol, its operation, and some of the major projects that have made use of it. There has been enough written (perhaps too much) about Z39.50 in the last several years so it is not intended to be a tutorial or detailed description of the protocol. The material that will be presented will try and put some context around the discussion. For those readers who are interested in delving into Z39.50 in a more technical manner, references to much of the material that has been written about it over the years will be provided at the end. Finally, the article will conclude with some thoughts on how technology and technological infrastructure have changed in the years since Z39.50 was initially developed and deployed, and where the protocol has so far lived up to its goals, and where it has perhaps failed to meet some of the high expectations that at least some people involved in the Z39.50 community held for it. The article will conclude with some of the author’s speculations (and they are really no more than that) of what the future role of Z39.50 is likely to be.

Describes the NISO circulation interchange protocol (NCIP) and some of the design decisions that were made in developing it. When designing a protocol of the scale and scope of NCIP, certain decisions about what technologies to employ need to be made. Often there are multiple competing technologies that can be employed to accomplish the same functionality, and there are both positive and negative reasons for the choice of any particular one. Focuses specifically on the areas on which the protocol would be supported. Gives particular emphasis to the decision to choose XML as the encoding technology for the protocol messages. One of the main design goals for NCIP was to try to strike the appropriate balance between ease of implementation and providing appropriate functionality. This functionality includes that needed to support both application areas that the committee could anticipate would use the protocol in the short term, and new applications that might be developed in the future.

Over the past eight years, the MELVYL catalog has become one of the largest public access catalogs in the world, and now plays a central role in providing access to the library resources of the University of California. Currently, under heavy load, the MELVYL catalog supports many hundreds of simultaneous terminal connections, servicing over a quarter of a million queries a week and displaying more than two million records a week to its user community. This article discusses the history of the network that has supported the MELVYL catalog from the early days of its prototype to the present. It also describes both the current technical and policy issues that must be addressed as the network moves into the 1990s, and the roles that the network is coming to play in integrating local automation, the union catalog, access to resource databases, and other initiatives. Sidebars discuss the TCP/IP protocol suite, internet protocol gateways, and Telenet and related inter‐operability problems.

The TULIP (The University Licensing Program) project was the first attempt on the University of California, Berkeley campus to provide journal page images directly to faculty and graduate student desktops. An electronic journal project can be viewed as the confluence of three factors: the technical implementation, the user group and the environment in which that user group functions, and the material itself. In the preceeding article, Mark Needleman addressed the technical specifics of the University of California (UC) implementation, which is common to all nine UC campuses. At Berkeley, we provided accessible workstations in the Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics Libraries for the use of faculty, students, or staff who might not have the required equipment or software in their laboratories or offices, as well as for demonstration and instruction purposes. However, all along we knew that the fate of any electronic journal project in the sciences would rest upon our ability to deliver the material successfully in the user's environment; in an academic setting, this necessarily means in a multitude of user environment types.

This article discusses the implementation of the TULIP (The University Licensing Program) system at the University of California. It describes the design of the system itself, shares some of the experience gained so far from the implementation along with implications for the future, and discusses plans for delivery of electronic information to the university community.

NISO (The National Information Standards Organization) has recently released the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NISO Z39.83) as a Draft Standard for Trial Use. This protocol defines a repertoire of messages and associated rules of syntax and semantics for use by applications: to perform the functions necessary to lend items; to provide controlled access to electronic resources; and to facilitate co‐operative management of these functions. It is intended to address conditions in which the application or applications that initiate the lending of items or control of access must acquire or transmit information about the user, items, and/or access that is essential to successful conclusion of the function. The article describes the reasons for the development of the standard and provides an overview of the services that it supports.

This issue of Library Hi Tech contains a series of articles about the TULIP materials science journal access project, an unprecedented cooperative undertaking involving Elsevier Science Publishing and a number of major universities in the United States.

Web technology presents exciting opportunities for the curators of collections of digitised images, but collaboration is vital if this potential is to be realised. DMU's ELISE II project, aiming to demonstrate a service that provides access to multiple image collections, is especially supportive of the cooperative development and uptake of standards for data transfer (e.g. Z39.50) and for the representation of structure and content (e.g. Dublin Core metadata).

Historically, library catalogs have been rather insular, often based on specialized hardware and/or operating systems lacking industry‐standard networking capabilities. Network access was not a major consideration in the design or selection of these specialized systems. But when library automation systems are attached to the network as an afterthought, they often display unsatisfactory functional characteristics; libraries now face the realities of the wired campus environment and the collision between library automation tradition and the new world of networks.

Background – Reliable and valid hospital nurse staffing measures are a major requirement for health services research. As the use of these measures increases, discussion is growing as to whether current nurse staffing measures adequately meet the needs of health services researchers.

Objective – This study assesses whether the measures, sampling frameworks, and data sources meet the needs of health services research in areas such as staffing assessment; patient, nurse, and financial outcomes; and prediction of staffing.

Methods – We performed a systematic review of articles from 1990 through 2007, which use hospital nurse staffing measures in original research, or which address the validity, reliability, and availability of the measures. Taxonomies of measures, sampling frameworks, and sources were developed. Articles were analyzed to assess what measures, sampling strategies, and sources of data were used and to ascertain whether the measures, samples, and sources meet the needs of researchers.

Results – The review identified 107 articles that use hospital nurse staffing measures for original research. Multiple types of measures, some of which are used more often than others and some of which are more valid than others, exist in each of the following categories: staffing counts, staffing/patient load ratios, and skill mix. Sampling frameworks range from hospital units to all hospitals nationally, with all hospitals in a state being the most common. Data sources range from small-scale surveys to national databases. The American Hospital Association Annual Survey is the most frequently used data source, but there are limitations with its nurse staffing measures. Arguably, the multiplicity of measures and differences in sampling and data sources are due, in part, to data availability. The limitations noted by other researchers and by this review indicate that staffing measures need improvements in conceptualization, content, scope, and availability.

Discussion – Recommendations are made for improvements to research and administrative practice and to data.