Using the Z39.50 Information Retrieval Protocol in the Internet Environment

Transcription

1 A PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL INFORMATION STANDARDS ORGANIZATION Contents Using the Z39.50 Information Retrieval Protocol in the Internet Environment 1 NISO News and Notes 5 NISO Press News 5 Standards Activity 6 NISO Balloting Calendar: 7 NISO Online: 7 International Update 7 Report of the ZIG-DIG Meeting in Gainesville 8 Standards Status: April 1, 1994* 10 Increased Asian Support for The Unicode StandardTM 11 Drake Receives Award 12 Next Issue Deadline: June 1, 1994 Volume 6 Number 2 ISSN April 1994 Using the Z39.50 Information Retrieval Protocol in the Internet Environment By Clifford A. Lynch Summary This report describes an approach to the implementation of the ANSI/NISO Z Standard for Information Retrieval in the TCP/IP environment, currently in wide use by the Z39.50 implementor community. Introduction Z39.50 is a US national standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval that was first adopted in 1988 [1] and extensively revised in 1992 [2]. The closely related international standard, ISO (service definition) [3] and (protocol) [4], colloquially known as Search and Retrieve or SR, reached full International Standard (IS) status in Work is ongoing within ISO Technical Committee 46 Working Group 4 Subgroup 4 to progress various extensions to SR through the international standards process. The international standard is essentially a compatible subset of the current US Z standard. Z39.50 is an applications layer protocol within the OSI reference model, which assumes the presence of lower-level OSI services (in particular, the presentation layer [5]) and of the OSI Association Control Service Element (ACSE) [6] within the application layer. Many institutions implementing this protocol chose to layer the protocol directly over TCP/IP rather than to implement it in an OSI environment or to use the existing techniques that provide full OSI services at and above the OSI Transport layer on top of TCP connections (as defined in RFC 1006 [7] and implemented, for example, in the ISO Development

2 Environment software). These implementors were concerned about the size and complexity of OSI implementations, the lack of availability of mature OSI software for the full range of computing environments in use at these institutions, and the perception of relative instability of the architectural structures within the OSI applications layer (as opposed to specific application layer protocols such as Z39.50 itself). Most importantly, some of these institutions were concerned that the complexity introduced by the OSI upper layers would outweigh the relatively meager return in functionality that they were likely to gain. Thus, for better or worse, the decision was taken to implement the Z39.50 protocol directly on top of TCP (with the understanding that this decision might be revisited at some point in the future). During , a group of implementing institutions agreed to participate in the Z39.50 Interoperability Testbed project (sometimes referred to by the acronym "ZIT") under the auspices of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). Their primary objective was to encourage the development of many interoperable Z39.50 implementations running over TCP/IP on the Internet. By mid- 1993, a number of independent Z39.50 implementations were operational and able to interoperate across the Internet. The Library of Congress, in its role as the Z39.50 Maintenance Agency for NISO, maintains a registry of the implementors [8], which includes members of the Z39.50 interoperability testbed. Information Standards Quarterly (ISSN ) is published quarterly by the National Information Standards Organization, P.O. Box 1056, Bethesda, MD 20827; (301) ; Bitnet: NISO@ENH.NIST.GOV. Michael J. Mellinger, Chairperson; Patricia Harris, Executive Director. ISQ Editor: Pat Ensor. Opinions expressed in signed articles and columns are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent the opinions of NISO or the staff of Information Standards Quarterly. Information Standards Quarterly is sent free of charge to members of NISO. Nonmembers may subscribe for $65 per year U.S., $85 foreign. Subscription requests, requests for back issues, and change of address forms should be sent to: NISO PRESS FUL- FILLMENT, P.O. Box 338, Oxon Hill, MD Editorial contributions, articles, news releases and letters should be sent to: Pat Harris, Executive Director, NISO, at the above address. Copyright 1994 National Information Standards Organization. All materials in this publication subject to copyright by the National Information Standards Organization may be photocopied for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of For other reprinting, photocopying, or translating, address requests to the National Information Standards Organization. This document describes implementation decisions by current implementors of Z39.50 in the Internet environment. These have been proven within the ZIT project and are being used by most of the members of the Z39.50 Implementors' Group (ZIG), an informal group that meets quarterly to discuss implementation and interoperability issues and to develop extensions to the Z39.50 protocol targeted for inclusion in future versions of the standard. Intended as a guide for other implementors who seek to develop interoperable Z39.50 implementations running over TCP/IP, this document focuses on issues related to TCP/IP, and it does not address other potential interoperability problems or agreements that have been reached among the implementors to address these problems. It does include a few notes about extensions to the existing Version 2 protocol that are being used in the implementor community which have interoperability implications. Potential implementors of Z39.50 should subscribe to the Z3950IW LISTSERV [9] to obtain information specific to the Z39.50 protocol and extensions under development as well as details of current implementations. Except where otherwise noted, the version of Z39.50 discussed here is ANSI/NISO Z , sometimes called Z39.50 Version 2 (the obsolete original version is referred to as Z or Z39.50 Version 1). The approach defined should also be applicable, perhaps with some minor changes, to future versions of the Z39.50 protocol, and specifically to Version 3 which is currently under development. This document will probably be updated to address new versions of the base Z39.50 protocol as they become stable. Encoding The Z39.50 standard specifies its application protocol data units (APDUs) in Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) [10]. These APDUs include EX- TERNAL references to other ASN.1 and non-asn.1 objects such as those defining record transfer syntaxes to be used in a given application association. The standard Basic Encoding Rules (BER) [11] are applied to the ASN.1 structures defined by the Z39.50 protocol to produce a byte stream that can be transmitted across a TCP/IP connection. The only restriction on the use of BER to produce this byte stream is that direct, rather than indirect, references must be used for EXTERNAL objects. This is necessary because there is no presentation context in the TCP/IP environment to support indirect reference. A Z39.50 implementation developed according to this specification and running over TCP/IP should produce a valid byte stream according to the Z39.50 standard, in the sense that the same byte stream could be passed to an OSI implementation. However, not all byte streams that can be produced by applying BER to the APDUs specified in the Z39.50 standard in an

3 OSI environment will be legitimate under this specification for the TCP/IP environment; this specification defines a subset of the possible byte streams valid in a pure OSI environment which excludes those using indirect reference for EXTERNAL objects. All other BER features should be tolerated by Z39.50 implementations running over TCP/IP, including the ability to accept indefinite length encodings, although it is preferable that implementations do not generate such encodings since they have caused problems for some ASN.1 / BER parsers. It should also be noted that at least to the best of the author's knowledge, there are no implementations at present that use ASN.1 /BER representations of floating point numbers; instead, integers with scaling factors have been used for these purposes. It should also be noted that Z39.50 version 2 does not really address character set encoding issues; these questions, and their interactions with ASN.1 /BER support for multiple character sets, are under active discussion as part of the effort to develop Z39.50 version 3. Connection In the Internet environment, TCP Port 210 has been assigned to Z39.50 by the Internet Assigned Number Authority [12]. To initiate a Z39.50 connection to a server in the TCP /IP environment, a client simply opens a TCP connection to port 210 on the server and then, as soon as the TCP connection is established, transmits a Z39.50 INIT APDU using the BER encoding of that INIT APDU as described above. Implementors should be aware that there is a substantial installed base of implementations of the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) system. The original versions of this software employed Z39.50 Version 1 with some extensions. Z39.50 Version 1 did not use BER encoding and Z39.50 Version 1 INIT APDUs look very different from the INIT APDUs of Z39.50 Version 2. Implementations of Z39.50 should at least be prepared to reject gracefully WAIS-type INIT APDUs. Some implementations recognize such INIT APDUs and revert to the Z39.50 Version 1 variant used in WAIS upon encountering them, thus providing backwards compatibility with the existing base of WAIS clients and; the usual means of checking for a WAIS, as opposed to Z39.50 Version 2, client is to see if the first byte sent on the connection is an ASCII zero, which indicates a WAIS client. (In version 1 of WAIS, bytes 0-9 of the first PDU contain an ASCII packet length; the lower case ASCII string "wais" appears starting at byte 12.) Work is currently underway to specify a WAIS profile for use with Z39.50 version 2 [13]; it is expected that this will be issued as a Z39.50 Applications Profile through the NIST OIW Library Automation Special Interest Group. This profile is expected to be compatible with the layering defined in this RFC. Service Mappings The Z39.50 standard maps Z39.50 services onto a variety of association control and presentation layer services. Connection establishment has already been discussed. The other two association control services that are relevant to Z39.50 are ABORT and RE- LEASE. The mapping of the RELEASE service to a standard TCP CLOSE is straightforward. The Z39.50 protocol itself does not, in the current version, include a Z39.50 CLOSE APDU. When the client has completed its interaction with the server, it calls the IR-RELEASE service, which is directly mapped to association control's orderly association release. In the TCP/IP environment, the client should simply initiate a TCP CLOSE. The mapping for association abort is more complex, partially because some TCP/ IP implementations cannot distinguish a TCP reset from the other side of the connection from other events. To accomplish an abort (that is, a mapping of the IR-ABORT service in the Z39.50 protocol) in the TCP /IP environment, client or server need only terminate the TCP connection either via TCP ABORT or TCP CLOSE. Real-world implementations need to be prepared to deal with both TCP ABORT and CLOSE anyway, so this approach presents no additional problems, other than the somewhat ambiguous nature of the type of association termination. It is expected that Z39.50 Version 3 will include a termination service which will involve an exchange of Z39.50 CLOSE APDUs, followed by an association RELEASE (which would presumably, in the Internet environment, be mapped to a TCP CLOSE). This new termination service is expected to support both graceful and abrupt termination. Of course, robust implementations will still need to be prepared to encounter TCP CLOSE or ABORT. Service mappings for the transmission of data by client and server (to the presentation layer P-DATA service) are trivial: They are simply mapped to TCP transmit and receive operations. TCP facilities such as expedited data are not used by Z39.50 in a TCP environment. Contexts At the point when the TCP connection is established on TCP port 210, client and server should both assume that the application context given in Appendixes A and B of the Z standard are in place. These are the ASN.1 definitions of the Z39.50 APDUs and the transfer syntax defined by applying the BER to these APDUs. Implementations can reasonably expect that the diagnostic set BIB-1 is supported, and, if resource control is being used, the resource report format BIB- 1 is supported as well. In the absence of a presentation negotiation mechanism, clients and servers should be cautious about using alternative attribute sets, diagnostic record formats, resource report formats, or other objects

4 defined by optional EXTERNALs within the Z39.50 ASN.1, such as authentication parameters, unless there is known to be prior agreement to support them. Of course, either participant in an association can reference such an object by object ID in an APDU, but there is no guarantee that the other partner in the association will be able to understand it. Robust implementations should be prepared to encounter unknown or unsupported object IDs and generate appropriate diagnostics. Over time, the default, commonly known pool of object IDs may be expanded (for example, to support authentication parameters). Implementors should refer to the document [14] issued by the Z39.50 maintenance agency in June 1992 for more details on the assumed contexts and object identifiers. Record syntaxes present a serious practical problem. In the OSI environment, the partners in a Z39.50 association are assumed to agree, either through presentation negotiation as part of association establishment, or later, dynamically, as part of the PRESENT process (through the use of the alter presentation context function at the presentation layer), on which record syntaxes the two entities commonly know. There is a preferred record syntax parameter that can be supplied by the client to guide this negotiation. A number of registered record syntaxes exist; some are based on ASN.1 and others use formats such as the MARC standard for the interchange of machine readable cataloging records which predate ASN.1, but are widely implemented. In the TCP/IP environment, if the server cannot supply the record in the preferred syntax, it has no guarantee that the client will understand any other syntax in which it might transmit the record back to the client, and has no means of negotiating such syntaxes. Several proposals have been suggested to solve this problem. One, which will likely be part of Z39.50 Version 3, is to replace the preferred record syntax parameter with a list of prioritized preferred syntaxes supplied by the client, plus a flag indicating whether the server is allowed to substitute a record syntax not on the list provided by the client. The currently proposed ASN.1 for this extension is upwards compatible with Z39.50 Version 2, although the details are still under discussion within the Z39.50 Implementor's Group. As the Version 3 ASN.1 becomes stable in this area, Z39.50 servers are encouraged to accept the extended ASN.1 for generalized preferred record syntax. The extensibility rules for Z39.50 negotiation let clients and servers negotiate the use of Z39.50 Version 2 plus the generalized preferred syntax feature from Version 3. Thus, a client could support the generalized preferred record syntax, propose its use to any server, and, if the server rejects the proposal, revert to the Version 2 preferred syntax feature. A second alternative (not incompatible with the Version 3 extension) would be to adopt a convention for TCP /IP implementations that the server not return a record in a syntax not on the preferred record syntax list provided by the client. Instead, it would return a diagnostic record indicating that a suitable record transfer syntax was not available. This strategy could be viewed as simply implementing a subset of the Version 3 solution, and should be considered by implementors of servers as a possible interim measure. Other Interoperability Issues Version 3 will include an "other" data field in each APDU, which can be used to carry implementationspecific extensions to the protocol. A number of implementations are already employing this field, and interoperable implementations might be wise to include code which at least ignores the presence of such fields rather than considering their presence an error (in contravention of the standard). Security Considerations This document does not discuss security considerations. However, it should be noted that the Z39.50 protocol includes mechanisms for authentication and security that implementors should review. Author's Address: Clifford A. Lynch, University of California, Office of the President, 300 Lakeside Drive, 8th clifford.lynch@ucop.edu Floor, Oakland, CA , (510) , References 1. National Information Standards Organization (NISO). American National Standard ANSI/ NISO Z , Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988). 2. ANSI /NISO Z (version 2) Information Retrieval Service and Protocol: American National Standard ANSI /NISO Z Information Retrieval Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification for Open Systems Interconnection. Bethesda, MD: NISO Press, ISO International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Documentation Search and Retrieve Service Definition, ISO International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Documentation Search and Retrieve Protocol Definition ISO Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Connection Oriented Presentation Service Definition, ISO Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Service Definition for the Association Control Service Element, See also ISO Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Protocol Specification for the Association Control Service Element, RFC 1006, ISO Transport Layer Services on Top

5 of the TCP, Version 3, Rose, Marshall and Dwight Cass, May Registry of Z39.50 Implementors, available from the Z39.50 Maintenance Agency (Ray Denenberg, ) 9. To subscribe to the Z39.50 Implementor's Workshop list send the message: SUB Z3950IW yourname to (or NERVM.BITNET). Current drafts of the Version 3 Protocol document are available through the Library of Congress GOPHER server, MARVEL.LOC.GOV. 10. ISO Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Specifications for Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), ISO 8825 Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Specification of Basic Encoding Rules for Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) RFC 1340 Assigned Numbers. Reynolds, J.K.; Postel, J.B. July WAIS Profile of Z39.50 Version 2, Revision 1.4, April 26, 1994, available from WAIS Inc. 14. Registration of Z39.50 OSI Object Identifiers (Z39.50-MA-024), available from the Z39.50 Maintenance Agency (Ray Denenberg ray@rden.loc.gov ) ISQ 3166 TAG to Meet The U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to ISO 3166 the international standard on country codes will meet on Friday June 10, 1994 in Washington, DC. The purpose of the meeting is to review the results of the recent meeting of TC46/ WG 2 on Country Codes and to share information on any problems associated with implementation of ISO This meeting is open to any person with an interest in ISO For further details on the meeting and to request a copy of the meeting agenda contact the NISO Office at or via niso@enh.nist.gov Sorting Committee to Begin Work The NISO standards committee to develop a national standard for sorting has been appointed. Appointed to the Standards Committee AK are: Hans Wellisch, Committee chair; Ruth E. Christ (representing the American Library Association); Albert Simmonds (R. R. Bowker); Ann Case (H. W. Wilson Company). New Voting Reps Appointed A warm welcome to NISO's newest Voting Representatives: Mary Sue Iddings and Janet Pingitore who are representing PSS Tapestry; and to Simon Kendall, newly appointed Alternate Voting Rep representing GEAC. NISO News and Notes Paper Workshop to Explore Aging Factors NISO is one of twenty U.S. and Canadian organizations sponsoring a national workshop on the Effects of Aging on Printing and Writing Papers to be held in Philadelphia July 6-8, The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for the broadest possible input into the requirements of a research program on paper permanence which will hopefully answer the remaining questions about lignin and its effects upon paper properties and determine if reliable accelerated aging tests can be developed. Lignin has long been viewed as one of the culprits in paper deterioration and NISO's paper permanence standard, Z , sets a lignin threshold. In the long term the results of this workshop and the research efforts which may emerge could well impact on NISO's standardization program. For details on the workshop and to register contact: Cecilia Tokarski at the ASTM: (Telephone) NISO Annual Meeting NISO's 1994 annual meeting and program will be held in Washington, DC in conjunction with the ASIS annual meeting. Details will be announced in the July issue of ISQ. Watch for details. ISQ NISO Press News Let NISO Press be your one-stop shop for information standards. NISO Press offers you the selection, the lowest price, and fastest service of the standards suppliers. Four new NISO standards are now available: Z Common Command Language Z Extended Latin Coded Character Set (ANSEL) Z Eye-legible Information on Microform Leaders and Trailers and on Containers of Processed Microfilm on Open Reels Z Software Description

6 Z Construction, Format and Management of Monolingual Thesauri will be published in June In addition, NISO is offering a number of standards-related titles to add to your bookshelf: Practical SGML (2nd edition) by Eric van Herwijnen is a basic resource on the application of SGML. This book will show you how by using SGML you can interchange documents and process them on many different systems in many different ways by customizing SGML to your applications. Price: $45. Standards for Archival Description by Vicki Walch is a thorough introduction to standards for both archival description and library and information services. Vicki Walch served as the Society of American Archivists voting rep to NISO and is truly an expert in this area! Price: $30. Scholarly Information and Standardization: Proceedings of the 12th NACSIS Open Forum held November 20, 1992 in Tokyo. This collection of eleven papers describes standardization practices, activities, and missions in six countries: the U.S., Canada, Korea, Japan, China and Singapore. It gives an excellent and up-to-date review of international standards development, with a particular emphasis on ISO TC 46. A comprehensive list of abbreviations and acronyms used in the standards world is included, as is a complete listing of national and international standards now being used in the information sciences. A very practical and useful resource. Price: $40. Standards: A Resource by Pat Ricci is an outstanding reference on national and international standards developers. It provides information on thousands of standards developers and their contact points. Special features: a bibliography on standards resources and a very useful index to the alpha-prefixes to standards. Price: $25. To place an order contact NISO PRESS at (phone), (fax). Thousands of NISO Press catalogs were distributed in February. If you did not get one please call the NISO Press office to request your free catalog ISQ Standards Activity Recent Balloting Results Z x Codes for the Representation of Languages for Information Interchange Ballot period: Nov. 22, 1993-February 22, 1994 Final results: 15 Yes 13 Yes with comments (ACS, AJL, ASIS, Baker & Taylor, LC, Medical LA, NIST, ATLA, OCLC, ARLIS/NA, INCOLSA, DoE / OSTI, NFAIS) 2 No (Mead Data Central, ALA) 1 Abstain (Ohionet) The results of the balloting have been transmitted to the Standards Committee for resolution. Most of the comments concerned the relationship of the U.S. revisions to the US MARC language code list and the related international standard now in development. It is expected that the comments will be successfully resolved and the revised edition of Z39.53 published in Z x Guidelines for Indexes an Related Information Retrieval Devices This is a revision of Z Guidelines for Indexes. Ballot period: Nov. 22, 1993-February 22, 1994 Final results: 16 Yes 10 Yes with comments (ACS, ASIS, ATLA, AJL, Gaylord, INCOLSA, Medical LA, Music LA, OCLC, RLG) 3 No (ALA, ASI, LC) 2 Abstain (NLM, Ohionet) Jim Anderson, chair of Standards Committee YY revising the indexing standard, reports that his committee will be meet in September to analyze and respond to the comments. Standards Development News Technical Reports Standard Thom Pinelli, the chair of Standards committee AH, convened a three day committee meeting in April to review a first draft of the revised standard. The committee hopes to issue a draft for public review by July Guides to Microform Sets Katha Massey, chairing the committee developing a national standard for guides to microform sets, held a committee meeting in February. A follow-up meeting will be held in June during the ALA annual conference. A first draft is expected to be issued before the close of Z39.2 Information Interchange The outstanding negative vote which delayed final approval of the revision of Z39.2 has been resolved. The revised standard will be published by NISO Press in the fall. Shelving Standard Update The proposed national standard for shelving, Z39.73, is nearing final approval and publication. The outstanding negative vote submitted by the Association of Jewish Libraries, is expected to be resolved by mid-year, clearing the way for

7 publication of the standard by the fall. Binding Committee Progress Report The joint NISO-Library Binding Institute committee developing a national standard for library binding met in February and again in March to develop an outline of points to be covered in the proposed standard. Debra McKern, at the Library of Congress, resigned as committee chair in January. Barclay Ogden, of the head of the University of California Conservation Department, has been appointed to replace McKern, who will continue to serve as a committee member. Results of Reconsideration Ballots The Reconsideration Ballots circulated in the fall of 1993 concerning the outstanding negatives on Z39.7, Library Statistics, and the adoption of the ISO book numbering standard (ISBN) resulted in additional comments from the voting members. Both matters are being reviewed with the hope that they can be successfully resolved. ISQ NISO Balloting Calendar: November 1993 Z x Indexes and related information retrieval devices Z x Language codes Z39.21 Reconsideration ballot February 1994 Z A redesignation of Z39.59 and concurrent approval of the ISO-approved equivalent standard ISO The deadline for return of ballots on has been extended until July 15, June 1994 NISO / ANSI /ISO 3166 Country Codes July 1994 Z x Revision of Z Scientific and Technical Reports The ballot package on NISO/ANSI/ISO was delayed in the mail. To allow our members sufficient time to review the standard the deadline for return of ballots on has been extended until July 15, NISO Online: NISO-1, NISO's list sery on the Internet, is being revamped and updated and will be up-and-running with the current NISO news by June. The CNI will be serving as the distribution point for the list serve and Cecilia Preston will be the list sery moderator to assure that the content is kept current. In addition to balloting news and a general recap of NISO activities, some new items will be added, including a section on anticipated changes to the country code standard (one of our most dynamic standards!) If you subscribed to NISO-1 you will receive a message shortly informing you of the operational changes to the list serv. As of June 15, NISO will begin distributing its draft standards that are out for review and or ballot, and those published standards pertaining to codes and protocols on the Internet. This will be a trial program which NISO will conduct for at least one year to test the feasibility of Internet distribution and the impact of Internet distribution on the standards development process. The first approved standard to be distributed will be Z The Coalition for Networked Information is working with NISO to make this happen. Thank you, CNI! ISQ International Update ISO 3166 revised and published U.S. Votes on Proposed International Standards: DIS 999 Guidelines for the content, organization, and presentation of indexes. Applicable to indexes of books, periodicals, reports, patents, and nonprint materials; does not cover computerized index generation. Developed by ISO TC46 / SC 9. US vote: Disapprove with comments. The U.S. vote to disapprove is based on the fact that U.S. practice does not support classification in filing as prescribed in DIS 999. Both the ALA Filing Rules and the proposed NISO American National Standard on indexing (Z x) prescribe strict alphabetical order without a heading, disregarding any punctuation marks, such as parentheses for qualifiers. DIS 4 Rules for the abbreviation of title words and titles of publications. Gives rules for abbreviating titles of serials and nonserial documents; this standardizes the basis of the List of Serial Titles Word Abbreviations. Developed by ISO TC46 / SC 9. US vote: Disapprove with comments. The standard provides for the abbreviation of components of compound words, whether or not they

8 are hyphenated which is inconsistent with U.S. practice. CD 3297 International Standard Serial Numbering. This revision of the ISSN standard was developed by SC 9. U.S. vote: Disapprove with comments. The U.S. voted to disapprove the text because the standard does not address the application of the ISSN to the same title published in different formats. It was also noted in the U.S. response that the information on the calculation of the check digit does not provide sufficient information to the prospective user of the standard. International Standards Out for Ballot The following proposed international standards or work items are now being reviewed and balloted. Deadlines noted are the close of the ISO ballot period. To request a copy of any of the items listed contact the NISO office. CD Archival papers Requirement for permanence and Durability. This Committee Draft is based on ISO 9706: 1994, which is derived from the NISO standard ANSI /NISO Z CD 11108, however, does not provide for papers of a lower grammage than 70 g/m2. Balloting closes April 30, DIS 2709 Format for Information Exchange. A revision of ISO 2709: 1981, the international (ISO) equivalent of Z39.2, the interchange format for the MARC record. Balloting closes: August 24, 1994 New work item to establish a TC46 /SC 10 working group to develop an international standard for long term storage for sound and video documents. Balloting closes April 30, New work item to develop an international standard for "Requirements for binding of books, periodicals, serials, and other paper documents for library and archival use. Methods and materials." If approved this work item will be assigned to SC 10 WG 4. Balloting closes April 30, Just Published International Standards The following international standards developed by ISO TC 46 have recently been published by ISO in Geneva and are now available in the U.S. from ANSI. To order any other ISO standards, contact the ANSI Customer Service Department, 11 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036, Telephone: ISO 3166: 1993 Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries. Price: $92, plus $6 shipping and handling. ISO 9706: 1994 Paper for Documents - Requirements for Permanence. Price: $31, plus $5 shipping and handling. ISO 10957: International Standard Music Number (ISMN). Price: $24, plus $4 shipping and handling. Report of the ZIG-DIG Meeting in Gainesville The meeting was co-chaired by Mark Hinnebusch of the ZIG and Mary Jackson of the DIG. Mary Jackson presented an overview of the purpose and activities of the NAILDD project. Among the points covered: project members were interested in taking a clearinghouse approach to ILL billing Libraries seemed to be moving to use of the commercial banking system (through credit card payments) for ILL reconciliation the Science /Technology Committee of ARL is also looking at ILL; one of the DIG's tasks will have to be to ensure that goals do not conflict. studies of ILL versus commercial document delivery indicated that the commercial sector seems to be able to fill 20-40% of requests, with the remainder falling on libraries. two-thirds of ARL libraries' supply of documents is in the form of photocopies, but ARL libraries' borrowings are books photocopies OCLC's Prism ILL system recorded that 60% of requests were for photocopies. A number of users gave summaries of their interest in ILL/ document delivery. Triangle Research Libraries Network is developing systems that provide a uniform presentation of network services to users, while managing the business backend transparently. They have had shared collection development for many years and rely heavily on it. OhioLink is implementing patroninitiated circulation in January, using proprietary protocols. Washington University, St. Louis underwrites widespread patron access to information databases and wishes to provide coherent document requesting facilities to its patrons. This will require a reasonably smooth mix of traditional ILL requesting a commercial document supply. The University of California now provides access to the TULIP document image databases via its catalogues. A lengthy discussion of ILL scenarios followed, based broadly on Joe Zeeman's ILL scenarios document. Lennie Stoval pointed out that the depiction of the bibliographic utilities' role in the future might not be accurate, since several major utilities were reconsidering the nature of their involvement in ILL. Jim Michael stressed that an expanded description of reciprocal borrowing was required, including some description of the local business arrangements that support reciprocity, e.g. the function of local circulation systems in inventory control. It was recognized that the patron's request for a

9 document could follow two paths, depending on the requirements of the patron and the policies of the library: one in which requests were routed via, and possibly paid by, the library; and the other in which the library had no particular role and the patron communicated directly with the supplying organization. It was agreed that there was an increasingly fuzzy line between circulation and ILL requesting, and that there was a need to avoid approaches that required building circulation knowledge and functions into client systems. One suggestion was that clients could make use of a ticket granting mechanism for determining eligibility for document requesting services. Discussion of this led Cliff Lynch to describe a scenario in which three parties are involved in an ILL or document delivery transaction: the patron requesting the document, the document supplier or broker, and the library (or other agency) that vouches for the requester and approves (and pays for) the request. Further discussion of this scenario led to the conclusion that one possible approach, in which the patron messaged directly with the supplier, and the supplier then communicated with the library in order to establish the bona fides of the patron, would be too complex to implement given the present state of the technology. It was therefore agreed to concentrate on the inverse model, in which the patron's order was routed via a "local server," which could intervene in processing of the request in all the ways that a traditional ILL department might and from which requests are passed to the supplier on the patron's behalf. This corresponds broadly to one scenario in the Zeeman document which allows libraries to control the loan in various ways, including checking that the item is not available locally, finding the cheapest supplier, etc. It was also agreed that there was simultaneously a requirement to allow an individual to request items directly from suppliers, on the condition that such transactions would take place entirely between the patron and the supplier, and the library would have no involvement in the transaction. This corresponds roughly to another Zeeman scenario, with the patron as requester. From the point of view of the library, the most effective implementation of the patron-to-local server model would probably be to maintain separate transactions for patron and supplier communications, since a patron's request would not necessarily result in an ILL request or document supply request to a supplier. The afternoon's discussion focussed on protocol support for these two scenarios, especially on the use of the ILL protocol versus Z39.50 Extended Services (XZ) for Document requesting. Those present overwhelmingly indicated that XZ would be the preferred approach whenever requesting was associated with information retrieval. For transactions involving a local server, either ZX or the full ILL protocol could be used as appropriate in the local conditions. FCLA indicated that its client systems, which had permanent Z39.50 associations with the local server, would use Z39.50 to search remote databases, and send a ZX request for an item to the local server. The local server would use the ILL protocol to send the request to the remote server. It was pointed out that document suppliers who now intended to support ZX would find it in their interests to support the ILL protocol as well. In further discussion it was agreed that ZX should not be interpreted to be a window into the ILL protocol. ZX was to be modeled as a window into some other local document requesting system. This other system might implement the ILL standard, but it need not. There was a "fire wall" between Z39.50 and the ZX requesting system, but ZX could provide a mechanism for "peeking over the wall," to obtain, for instance, information about the current status of the request. In order to allow implementors who intended to support both the ILL protocol and ZX to reuse modules as much as possible, it was agreed that ILL and ZX should share a common set of data elements for both requesting and status reporting. However, rather than import the ILL APDUs directly into the ZX task package, it was agreed that data types equivalent to the ILL protocol's ILL-Request APDU and the Status-or-Error-Report APDU would be incorporated into the Document Request Extended Service task package. This has the advantage of allowing mandatory and optional elements to be reassessed for the different environment. Ray Denenberg undertook to incorporate the data elements into the ZX task package; Joe Zeeman agreed to supply Denenberg with the machine readable ASN.1 for ILL; a small team is to review this work. Outstanding issues: an ILL interoperability testbed would be required, similar to the Z39.50 interoperability testbed; some profile issues remained to be resolved, such as the transport vehicle for ILL protocol messages; mechanisms were needed to support user discovery of supply options. Mark Hinnebusch pointed out that ILL, although of increasing significance in library operations, has been and remains a low priority in terms of library system development, and that this might hinder the rapid deployment of an interoperability testbed. Paula Tallim of the National Library of Canada raised the recent PACS-L message from Tony Barry describing the use of MIME mail for delivery of electronic documents. (Continued on page 12)

10 Standards Status: April 1, 1994* Page Status 6 Approved 6 Resolution Resolution 7 Resolution Revision 6 Revision SDC Review 7 Reconsideration Formation Revision Revision 6 Resolution SDC Review Resolution Resolution Development Revision 6 Approved Revision Development Formation Development 7 Development 6 Development Development 5 Development Development Standard or Committee Z Z x Z x Z x Z (R1986) Z Z x Z Z Z x Z Z x Z x Z x Z x Z x Z x Z Z SCMM SCQQ SCSS SCZZ SCAC SCAJ SCAK SCAL Information Interchange (A revision of Z ) Guidelines for Indexes and Related Information Retrieval Devices (A revision of Z ) Abbreviations of Titles of Publications Library Statistics Writing Abstracts (SCAG) Scientific and Technical Reports (SCAH) Criteria for Price Indexes for Library Materials International Standard Book Number (ISBN) Ballot Advertising of Micropublications Bibliographic References Information on Microfiche Headings Codes for the Representation of Languages for Information Interchange Env. Conditions for Storage of Paper-based Library... Materials Patron Record Data Elements Format for Circulation Transactions Holdings Statements for Bibliographic Items Format for Submission of Data for Multimedia CD-ROM Mastering (SCAE) Single-Tier Steel Bracket Library Shelving Permanent and Durable Library Catalog Cards Env. Conditions for the Exhibition of Library... Materials Physical Preparation of Theses and Dissertations... Information to be Included in Ads [etc.] for Products Used for the Storage, Binding or Repair of Library Materials Library Binding and Library Prebound Books Guides to Microform Sets Format for Downloading Records from Bibliographic and Abstracting Indexing Databases Sorting of Alphanumeric Characters and Other Symbols Holdings Statements for Bibliographic Items * Note: this list does not include current, approved standards not being revised.

11 Increased Asian Support for The Unicode StandardTM The Unicode StandardTM is ready to address realworld issues from multilingual computing systems to distributed applications on global networks. That was the conclusion of the recent Unicode/ISO Implementers' Workshop held in Tokyo. The fifth of a series of worldwide workshops organized by The Unicode Consortium, this Asian-base workshop was co-sponsored by Novell Japan and Microsoft Japan. Participants from nine different countries saw demonstrations of the first commercially available implementations supporting The Unicode Standard and were convinced that the handling of Asian languages is quite natural. They learned how even existing applications and data can be supported in a manner transparent to the user. The Unicode Consortium was founded in 1991 and is dedicated to the development, maintenance, and promotion of The Unicode Standard, a sixteenbit, fixed-width, worldwide character encoding. The Unicode Standard encodes the characters from the world's principal scripts and languages, allowing the conversion to and from all national, international, and vendor code set standards. Commenting on increased ease of localization, Mr. Shun-Ichi Kajisa, manager of Windows NTTM Development for Microsoft Japan said: "Microsoft Japan has had very good experiences porting Windows NT, which is based on the Unicode standard, to the Japanese market. the system is robust and supports Japanese applications well. By avoiding the traditional method of Shift JIS enabling in favor of Unicode, we were able to achieve significant reductions in manpower and time to market. Companies represented at the workshop included Adobe Japan, Apple Japan, Digital Japan, Fijitsu, Hitachi, IBM Japan, Just Systems, NEC, NTT, Oracle Japan, Toshiba, and Yokogawa Hewlett-Packard. Catalogue of Implementations released: In conjunction with the Tokyo Workshop, The Unicode Consortium released the first edition of its "Catalogue of Implementations" that documents an ever-growing list of products that are based on The Unicode Standard. Eighteen products are currently listed, including Windows NT for Intel and DEC Alpha processors, Netware 4.01 Directory S ervicetm, Typographic International series Postscript FontsTM, and Galaxy Application EnvironmentTM from Visix. "The Unicode Standard provides easier support for international client/server software, specifically for Asian countries," said Dr. F. Avery Bishop, Program Manager for Japanese Windows NT development for Digital EQuipment Corporation. "Therefore, DEC is planning on implementing Unicode on all supported platforms." Acceptance in China and Japan: The Unicode standard treats all scripts equally and its suitability for the encoding needs of Asia is demonstrated by two significant events. In December 1993, the Chinese national standards organization adopted International Standard ISO (which is code-for-code equivalent to the Unicode standard) as Chinese National Standard GB The Japanese national standards organization is in the process of doing the same, and is also creating a set of authorized transcoding tables between the new standard and the existing Japanese Industrial Standard Character encoding. As Professor Kohji Shibano, Chair of the JISC Character Coding Committee charged with developing the new standard noted, "Japan has translated ISO to Japanese and is in the process of adopting it as a Japanese standard, JIS X In addition, [the Japanese Standards Organization] JIS is revising its existing standards to be consistent with the new ISO /Unicode standard." Mr. Yasushi Nakahara, a senior specialist in operating systems architecture at Toshiba Corporation, commented on this development. "Unicode /ISO is a promising standard for Japan as well. It will help to bring together international computing. Beyond universal character set standardization, we hope to see further unification of international and Japanese operating systems' character handling as well as common APIs for text and internationalization. This will be a great benefit to application writers and users by supporting worldwide portability and interoperability." The Unicode Consortium: In addition to cooperating with ISO on the International Standard ISO the Consortium is responsible for providing technical information to implementers and promoting the Unicode Standard and ISO The Unicode Consortium is comprised of major computer companies. Members of the Unicode Consortium are: Apple Computer, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, I.B.M. Corporation, Lotus Development Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, NeXT Computer, Novell, The Research Libraries Group, Symantec Corporation, Taligent, Unisys Corporation, and WordPerfect Corporation. The Unicode Consortium can be reached on the Internet at Unicode-inc@unicode.org, or by phone at (408) The Unicode Standard and Consortium and the Unicode design mark are trademarks of Unicode Inc. All other trademarks are owned by their respective companies.

12 (Continued from page 9) She indicated that the National Library of Canada was very interested in this suggestion, and was eager to get some implementation experience via a pilot project of some sort. Expressions of interest were (and are) welcome. Prepared by Joe Zeeman, Software Kinetics Ltd, Ottwa, Ontario. Thanks to Fay Turner, Paula Tallim, Ray Denenberg and Mark Hinnebusch for reviewing draft versions. Drake Receives Lifetime Achievement Award The University of Pittsburgh has presented Miriam A. Drake, dean and director of libraries at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with the first annual Kent/Computers in Libraries Award for Lifetime Achievement, sponsored by Mecklermedia. Drake was chosen to receive the award on the basis of her pioneering efforts in changing the nature of information transfer. Through her commitment to end-user access, Drake has helped to revolutionize information delivery. She is the architect of Library 2000, an online interactive information system at Georgia Tech, which has profoundly affected students' awareness, means of acquisition, and use of information. The system has made it possible for students to define their own information needs and to develop useful patterns of access to information. To realize the objectives of Library 2000, Drake has brought together a campus network, database management software, commercial databases, and an extensive end-user training program. Under her direction, the Georgia Tech libraries have consulted with national and international libraries so that they may also benefit from this groundbreaking endeavor. In addition to her duties at Georgia Tech, Drake is president of the Special Libraries Association. The Kent/Computers in Libraries Award was developed by Mecklermedia in association with the University of Pittsburgh's School of Library and Information Science and is named in honor of Allen Kent, distinguished service professor emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. Kent is a pioneer in the field of library automation and is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Throughout his career, he has been an innovator and leader in the information profession. The award will be presented annual to an individual who exemplifies Kent's high standards, while making an important and lasting contribution in the area of library/automation technology. In addition to the honor itself, the award carries a $500 honorarium and an inscribed Tiffany prism.