| Metadata: an overview of current resource description practice Work Package 3 of Telematics for Research project DESIRE (no. 1004) | Title page Table of Contents |
RFC 1807 (A Format for Bibliographic Records by R. Lasher & D. Cohen. June1995) is a memo, not a standard, and defines a format for E-mailing bibliographic records of technical reports. RFC 1807 obsoletes RFC 1357 of July 1992.
US technical community.
The format was designed to be easy to read and create. Bibliographic records can be prepared and read using any text editor, without any special programs.
RFC 1807 is not a standard, but use of the format is 'encouraged'.
Programs have been written to map between RFC 1807 records and structured USMARC cataloguing records, and also from USMARC to this RFC.
The format makes use of self-explaining alphabetic tags (field-ID's) to designate the fields. The four extra fields that were added to the old format (RFC 1357) are: handle, other_access, keyword and withdraw.
• AUTHOR
• CORP-AUTHOR: Corporate author
• TITLE
• ORGANIZATION: publishing organization
• TYPE (e.g. summary, final project report, etc.)
• CONTACT: Contact for the author(s)
• DATE: Publication date
• PAGES: Total number of pages
• PERIOD: Time period covered (date range)
• SERIES: Series title, including volume number
• NOTES: Miscellaneous free text
• Specific for technical reports:
• FUNDING: Name(s) of funding organization(s)
• CONTRACT: Contract number(s)
• GRANT: Grant number(s)
• MONITORING: Name(s) of monitoring organization(s)
• KEYWORD: for controlled and uncontrolled keywords
• CR-CATEGORY: to be used for Computer Science publications. Possibly in future similar fields will be added for other domains. CR-CATEGORY contains The Computer Reviews Category according to the CR Classification System.
• ABSTRACT: not mandatory, but highly recommended. Unlimited in length, but applications should not be expected to handle more than c. 10,000 characters. The abstracts are used for subject searching.
Two fields are available for location and access data:
• HANDLE: Unique permanent identifiers that are used in the Handle Management System to retrieve location data. A handle is a printable string which when given to a handle server returns the location of the data. If the technical report is available in electronic form, the Handle must be supplied in the bibliographic record.
• OTHER-ACCESS: For URLs, URNs and other yet to be invented formatted retrieval systems. (Only one URL or URN per occurrence of the field). When the URN standard is finalized naming authorities will be registered and URNs will be viable unique identifiers. Until then this is a place holder.
No seperate fields.
There are ORGANIZATION and CONTACT fields for the publishing organization and the contact for the author(s) respectively. Their are no additional fields for data pertaining to the host organization providing the report, or the contact of the host.
• BIB-VERSION: identifies the version of the format used to create this bibliographic record.
• ID: identifies the bibliographic record
• ENTRY: Date when the bibliographic record was created
• END: Indicates the end of the record by repeating the same ID that was used in the ID field at the beginning of the record.
• REVISION indicates that the current bibliographic record is a revision of a previously issued record and is intended to replace it.
• WITHDRAW: indicates that the document is no longer available
• BIB-VERSION, ID, ENTRY and END must appear as the first, second, third and last fields and may not be repeated. The other fields may be repeated as needed.
• RETRIEVAL: Information on how to get a copy of the full text. Open ended format (= arbitrary text field)
• COPYRIGHT: Copyright information of the cited report. Permissions and disclaimers. Open ended format (= arbitrary text).
The format is not designed for use with specific catoguing rules. Guidelines for the content of the fields are given in RFC 1807.
• LANGUAGE: The full English name of the language in which the report is written. If the language is not specified, English is assumed.
Not many linking facilities. In the revision field a link is made to the obsolete record that is to be replaced.
Medium. As the format is specially designed for the description of technical reports, a number of fields is only relevant to this kind of material and the format is not especially suited for the description of other kinds of documents.
The format is designed for sending data of technical reports by e-mail. The RFC defines only the format of bibliographic records, not the way to process them.
RFC 1807 is used by the Cornell University Dienst architecture (which provides an open, distributed digital library, of which all the services make use of the Dienst protocol) and by the Stanford University SIFT system (newsgroups).
RFC 1807 has been in use by the five ARPA-funded computer science institutions to exchange bibliographic records (Cornell, Stanford, UC, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University).
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