The SRU package provides a framework for working with the Search and Retrieval by URL (SRU) protocol developed by the Library of Congress. SRU defines a web service for searching databases containing metadata and objects. SRU often goes under the name SRW which is a SOAP version of the protocol. You can think of SRU as a RESTful version of SRW, since all the requests are simple URLs instead of XML documents being sent via some sort of transport layer. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/SRU/