Net::z3950::zoom provides a nice, perlish implementation of the zoom abstract api described and documented at http://zoom.z3950.org/api/

the zoom module is implemented as a set of thin classes on top of the non-oo functions provided by this distribution's net::z3950::zoom module, which in turn is a thin layer on top of the zoom-c code supplied as part of index data's yaz toolkit. because zoom-c is also the underlying code that implements zoom bindings in c++, visual basic, scheme, ruby, .net (including c#) and other languages, this perl module works compatibly with those other implementations. (of course, the point of a public api such as zoom is that all implementations should be compatible anyway; but knowing that the same code is running is reassuring.)