The enormous growth of various online bibliographic databases on world wide web O l i n t e r n e t has led the library professionals to learn the diverse data structures and various search interfaces of these databases for effective information retrieval. 239.50 is a protocol which reduces the burden of library professionals by providing one search interface for multiple databases. It also makes interlibrary loan totally electronic. This paper discusses this protocol in detail. * 239.50 is an

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... pen communication protocol. * I t specifies a standard way of cammunication between two systems for searching databases and retrieving information. * It is platform independent, i.e., it allows communication between two computer systems having different hardware and software. In other words, it allows uniform access to a large number of diverse and heterogeneous information resources. * This protocol is session-oriented and stateful in contrast to well-known stateless internet protocols such as HTTP (used by WWW) and gopher.