Digital libraries and OPACs are offering an enormous
collection of information resources which can be accessed
through Internet by quite different users thanks to the existence
of standard protocols for information retrieval such
as Z39.50. However, some users may find difficult to get
the items they are looking for in such a huge bulk of heterogeneous
resources since they have to know where and
how they have to search for. Thus, one of the main reasons
for the disregard of the Z39.50 service has traditionally
been the absence of appropriate interfaces and the cost
of making alternative searches. WAY-Z39.50 tries to help
spreading the use of these servers by providing easy web
access to them, as well as, by facilitating the access to multiple
servers at once. The prototype described implements
the WAY general model based on an agent-based architecture
that provides adaptive searching in different servers
through an adaptive interfac
