A Format for Bibliographic Records
RFC 1807

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Network Working Group                                          R. Lasher
Request For Comments: 1807                                      Stanford
Obsoletes: 1357                                                 D. Cohen
Category: Informational                                          Myricom
                                                               June 1995

                   A Format for Bibliographic Records

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  This memo
   does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of
   this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   This RFC defines a format for bibliographic records describing
   technical reports.  This format is used by the Cornell University
   Dienst protocol and the Stanford University SIFT system.  The
   original RFC (RFC 1357) was written by D. Cohen, ISI, July 1992.
   This is a revision of RFC 1357.  New fields include handle,
   other_access, keyword, and withdraw.

Introduction

   Many universities and other R&D organizations routinely announce new
   technical reports by mailing (via the postal services) the
   bibliographic records of these reports.

   These mailings have non-trivial cost and delay.  In addition, their
   recipients cannot conveniently file them, electronically, for later
   retrieval and searches.

   Publishing organizations that wish to use e-mail or file transfer to
   obtain these announcements can do so by using the following format.

   Organizations may automate to any degree (or not at all) both the
   creation of these records (about their own publications) and the
   handling of the records received from other organizations.

   This format is designed to be simple, for people and for machines, to
   be easy to read ("human readable") and create without any special
   programs.

   This RFC defines the format of bibliographic records, not how to
   process them.

Lasher & Cohen               Informational                      [Page 1]
RFC 1807           A Format for Bibliographic Records          June 1995

   This format is a "tagged" format with self-explaining alphabetic
   tags. It should be possible to prepare and to read bibliographic
   records using any text editor, without any special programs.

   This RFC includes the CR-CATEGORY, a field useful for Computer
   Science publications.  It is expected that similar fields will be
   added for other domains.

   This format, as described in RFC 1357, was implemented as part of the
   Dienst system and has been in use by the five ARPA-funded computer
   science institutions to exchange bibliographic records (Cornell, SU,
   UC, MIT, and CMU).  Programs have been written to map between this
   RFC and structured USMARC (format developed at the Library of
   Congress) cataloging records, also from USMARC to the RFC.

   The focus of this ARPA-funded research has been into many aspects of
   digital libraries including searching and accessing techniques that
   do not necessarily use bibliographic records (for example, natural
   language processing, automatic and full-text indexing).  However, the
   continued use of bibliographic records is expected to remain an
   important part of the library system environment of the future and
   its use is an important link between the physical world of scientific
   works and the on-line world of digital objects. The format described
   in this paper allows a link between these two worlds to be created.

   This format was developed with considerable help and involvement of
   Computer Science and Library personnel from several organizations,
   including Carnegie Mellon University, Corporation for National
   Research Initiatives (CNRI), Cornell University, University of
   Southern California/Information Sciences Institute (ISI), Meridian
   (now called DynCorp), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford
   University, and the University of California.  Key contributions were
   provided by Jerry Saltzer of MIT, and Larry Lannom of DynCorp.  The
   initial draft was prepared by Danny Cohen and Larry Miller of ISI.
   The revision was done by Rebecca Lasher from Stanford with assistance
   from the CS-TR participants.

   This RFC does not place any limitations on the dissemination of the
   bibliographic records.  If there are limitations on the dissemination
   of the publication, it should be protected by some means such as
   passwords.  This RFC does not address this protection.

   The use of this format is encouraged.  There are no limitations on
   its use.

Lasher & Cohen               Informational                      [Page 2]
RFC 1807           A Format for Bibliographic Records          June 1995

The Information Fields

   The various fields should follow the format described below.

   <M> means Mandatory; a record without it is invalid.
   <O> means Optional.

   The tags (aka Field-IDs) are shown in upper case.

           <M>  BIB-VERSION of this bibliographic records format