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Library Information Interchange StandardsThis section of the OII Standards and Specifications List provides information on standards used for the interchange of information between libraries. The 100+ standards listed in this section have been grouped under the following headings:
Note: This section supplements details of the general-purpose data classification standards in the Data Classification Standards section of theOII Standards and Specifications List. Standards for the interchange of library information have been prepared or advised by the following public bodies:
The EU Telematics for Libraries Programme, run by Directorate General XIII of the European Commission, manages a number of research and training projects throughout Europe. For more information contacthttp://www.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html. For a full assessment of some of the relationships between the standards mentioned in this report refer to the studies prepared as part of the EU Libraries Programme's EuropaGate project, which can be accessed electronically fromhttp://europagate.dtv.dk/reports.htm. The EU Libraries Programme has supported EDI activities through its EDILIBE projects. EDILIBE and EDItEUR, the Pan-European Book Sector EDI Group, have developed a set of EDI implementation guidelines for the book sector, based on the conventions developed by EAN (International Article Numbering Association) which cover a series of EDIFACT Trade messages. These guidelines are being maintained by EDItEUR under the IMPRESS project of the Libraries Programme. See the OII EDI section for further information on EDI standards. |
ANSI Z39.50Expanded nameInformation Retrieval Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description The original 1988 standard was updated in 1992 to conform with the rules laid down in ISO 10162/10163. ANSI Z39.50 enhances the ISO rules and provides a superset of search options for use in OSI compliant applications. Version 3 of the standard was approved by ANSI during 1995. As it implements the ISO 10162 amendments to provide scan and access control functionality and adds other functions required by US libraries it has been submitted to ISO for fast-track approval as ISO 23950. Note: Version 3 of Z39.50 was discussed and developed by the ZIG group. Usage (Market segment and penetration) CHEST, the UK Combined Higher Education Software Team has selected Z39.50-compliant software to connect 200 UK higher education institutes to the UK Educational Resources Information Centre (ERIC) and the British Education Index (BEI). The OPAC Network in Europe (ONE) is an EC funded project which will provide library users with better ways to access Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) and other national catalogues, and which will stimulate and facilitate interworking between libraries in Europe. Some of the participants already offer operational services based on Z39.50 and/or ISO-SR. SOCKER is a project within the EU Libraries Programme whose objective is primarily to implement the origin (client) part of the SR (Z39.50 V2) protocol for network based searching of library catalogues and other databases. On the server side the ARCA project will allow existing OPACs to act as SR targets. The EC funded Project Paragon aims to provide library users with a single gateway to three major sound archive catalogues via Netscape and the World Wide Web. The common interface is based an implementation of the ISO-SR standard and its American equivalent, Z39.50, designed to meet the special needs of the users of sound and media archives. The EC funded EuropaGate project provides a Z39.50 gateway for WWW and e-mail users via the Internet. Further details available from: On-line information on current updates and implementations is provided at http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency. Other useful sources of information on Z39.50 can be found at http://ds.internic.net/z3950/z3950.html, http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/VI/5/op/udtop3.htm andhttp://linnea.helsinki.fi/z3950/z3950pr.html. A discussion of the role of Z39.50 can be found in Chapter 3 of the EuropaGate Report. A discussion of the relationship between Z39.50 and ISO-SR can be found in Chapter 5 of the EuropaGate Report. The European Forum for Implementors of Library Applications (EFILA) is working with IFOBS and the Z39.50 Implementors Group (ZIG) to develop profiles for the use of Z39.50 within Europe. EFILA is discussing how the Z39.50 protocol can support international character sets. The Z39.50 Implementors Group (ZIG) is an international group with participants from all over the world (Europe, Australia, etc.). The group is, however, dominated by American implementors implementing Z39.50 in library systems and other information retrieval systems. The group generally meets once a year in Europe. The ZIG meetings for 1998 will be held in Orlando (January 21-23) and, possibly, Library of Congress, Washington (June 1-3).
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Bibliographic Character SetsArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Note: Many of these standards have been replaced by the more general purpose standards listed in the separate section onCharacter Sets. Usage (Market segment and penetration) The PROLIB/CoBRA CHASE project has developed software to convert from 7 and 8 bit character sets to ISO 10646 level 3. Level 3 is the acceptable level to accommodate the needs of libraries for character representation in bibliographic records. ANSI Z39.50 version 3 allows for International Strings which are compatible with the use of ISO 10646. Further details available from:
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BibliographiesArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description ISO 832 defines rules that can be used to abbreviate bibliographic references. Methods for filing bibliographic entries are defined in ISO 7154. ISO Technical Report 8393 shows how these rules can be applied in a typical situation related to ISO standards. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
Document Presentation StandardsArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
GEDIExpanded name Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description The agreements concentrate on two elements:
The GEDI format is defined as consisting of descriptive header information followed by the document image. In the first version, the agreements contained a limited set of descriptors to describe a TIFF image and specified the exclusive use of FTAM for the interchange mechanism. The second version has a extended set of descriptors to allow better mapping between GEDI and ISO ILL data elements, and offers the option to use either FTAM or FTP for the interchange. The document is still specified as a multi-page TIFF image. In the third version, which is currently under development and is expected to be released in the summer of 1997, other document types are included (including PDF, JPEG, PostScript), FTAM is removed and MIME-compliant electronic mail is added as an interchange mechanism. The third version has been submitted as a work item for ISO TC46/SC4/WG4. Usage (Market segment and penetration) The use of the GEDI agreements in a multi-national European context has been demonstrated in the EC funded EDIL project (http://www.echo.lu/libraries/en/projects/edil.html). Further details available from: |
Interlibrary LoansArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description ISO 10161 provides an ASN.1 specification for the provision of services conforming to ISO 10160. Alternatively the messages are treated as EDIFACT messages. Internationally standardized profiles for the use of these standards are defined in the OSI-ISP ALD2n Library and Documentation Interlibrary Loan Store-and-Forward Protocols. Usage (Market segment and penetration) In 1995, an implementers' group was established (IPIG), which was expanded to include various European organisations in 1996. The EC sponsored DALI project has developed and evaluated a service for multimedia document delivery in a distributed environment, usingISO-ILL. The service provides intelligent user support within a library-based infrastructure. Another EC sponsored research project that implements ILL is UNIVERSE. Further details available from: The European Commission sponsored the ION OSI pilot/demonstration project between library networks in Europe for interlending services. The project interconnected three sites (UK, Netherlands and France) with three front-end processors (on three different UNIX platforms), based on subsets of the ILL protocol and of the ISO-SR protocol (for two of the sites) and using research networks and X.25. Another project sponsored by the European Commission was AIDA (Alternatives for International Document Availability), which demonstrated the use of ILL. For details contact http://www.cib.unibo.it/aida/. |
ISO-SRArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description ISO 8777 defines a total of 30 search and retrieve commands, together with 8 special symbols that can be used to qualify commands. The keywords defined include ALL, BACK, BASE, DEFINE, DELETE, FIND, FORWARD, HELP, HOLD, INFO, PRINT, RELATE, REC (count records), REV (print search history), REVIEW, SAVE, SCAN, SDI (specify a particular SAVE update), SHOW, STOP and TO. These may be qualified by the commands AND, EQ, GE, GT, LE, LT, NE, NOT and OR, and the symbols ( ) ; " # ? ! and %. In addition the standard suggests field labels for abstracts (AB), author affiliation (AF), accession number (AN), author name (AU), classification code (CC), controlled term (CT), descriptor (DE), document type (DT), computer entry date (ED), journal number (JN), journal title (JT), language (LA), ISBN (SB), source (SO), ISSN (SS), subject (SU), title (TI) and uncontrolled term (UT). ISO 10162 described how a search service conforming to the rules specified for the OSI Application Layer defined in ISO 7498 can be set up using the ACSE protocols defined in ISO 8649. The standard defines search and replace (SR) services for libraries, information utilities and union catalogue centres using a client/server model. A state transition diagram is provided to illustrate the steps involved. The service provides a small set of commands that allow a query originator to initialise, search, present, delete query result sets, release and abort operations at a target location. ISO 10163 provided an ASN.1 specification for the provision of services conforming to ISO 10162. A number of draft amendments have been published, relating to the scanning of ordered lists, sorting, proximity searching, record segmentation and the provision of facilities for access control, resource control, concurrent operations and suspend/resume. International standard profiles for the use of ISO 10162/3 have been defined in the OSI-ISP ALD1n Library and Documentation Search and Retrieve specifications. Note: TC46/SC4 has requested the withdrawal of ISO 10162 and ISO 10163 following publication of ISO 23950 in 1997. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: A description of the use of ISO-SR can be found in Chapter 4 of the EuropaGate Report. Software for use of ISO-SR has been developed as part of the European Community sponsored SOCKER project, details of which can be found at http://mediator.uni-c.dk/socker/ Other EC projects using ISO-SR include the OPAC Network in Europe (ONE) and Access to Remote CAtalogues (ARCA).
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ISO 12083Expanded nameElectronic manuscript preparation and markup Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description The markup tags provided by this rather dated set of standardized markup tags are rather cryptic. For example, <fwd> is used to identify a foreword, while <aid> marks the start of an article identifier. The Document Type Definition (DTD) for books and articles is broken down into front matter elements, body elements, appendix elements and back matter elements, though different combinations of elements are provided in each category for the two DTDs. The DTD for serials does not allow for the inclusion of appendices but does allow for multiple parts in a serial. Attributes are defined separately from the corresponding elements. Separate entity sets are provided for Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Greek and Cyrillic, but these repeat many of the definitions provided in the standard ISO character sets, which can also be referenced from the DTD. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from:
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Library StatisticsArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description ISO 2789 covers how to count libraries, librarians, books, cassettes, discs, etc, for inclusion in statistics relating to library provision. ISO 9230 identifies 25 classifications of books that are used by UNESCO to determine pricing classifications, and provides rules for calculating price indices for books, serials, etc. ISO 9707 identifies classifications of books, etc, for which statistics should be maintained on details of selling points, languages, numbers sold, circulations, electronic publications, micropublications, publishers and printing houses. ISO 10324 allows stock levels to be recorded for books and serials. Draft International Standard 11620 will provide a standardized method for the electronic interchange of library performance indicators. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
MARCExpanded nameMachine Readable Cataloguing Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Despite cooperation there emerged two versions, UKMARC and USMARC, which reflected the national cataloguing practices and requirements of BNB and the Library of Congress. Consequently, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) were published in 1968 in both British and North American editions. The revision of AACR was undertaken by the British Library, the Library of Congress and other bodies in the UK and North America. The objectives were to reconcile the British and North American texts of 1968, to incorporate amendments and to provide for international interest in AACR. The publication of the second edition (AACR2) in 1978 was a landmark in standardizing procedures for the description of books and other items and for the construction of headings and references. Throughout the 1980s there was a growing international commitment to networks and shared cataloguing based on AACR2 which by then had been adopted by a number of non-English speaking countries. Although the basic concepts of AACR2 did not change, three sets of rule revisions were required to take account of international usage, new library materials and rapid technological change. This process was consolidated with the publication of a 1988 revision of AACR2. In 1994 a set of amendments, known as Amendments 1993, was published comprising clarifications and slight changes to existing rules, which the British Library has since applied to BNB MARC records. The UKMARC format is used also to convey Cataloguing-in-Publication (CIP) records for forthcoming publications. Since the early 1970s an extended family of more than 50 MARC formats has grown up. Inevitably, differences in data content mean that editing is required before records can be exchanged. One solution to the problem of incompatibility was to create an international MARC format, UNIMARC. This format originally covered monographs and serials, but was extended in 1987 to include non-book materials. The format is maintained and developed under the supervision of the Permanent UNIMARC Committee. ISO 2709 defines the tape exchange format that MARC records conform to. ISO 2709 files start with a fixed length record label followed by variable length records containing a directory map, a record identifier, MARC reserved fields and MARC bibliographic fields. The ISO 4873IS2 and IS3 codes are used as field and record terminators respectively. Usage (Market segment and penetration) The OCLC database, which uses USMARC, is used by more than 20,000 libraries in 61 countries. The OCLC database currently holds over 30 million bibliographic records in over 400 languages. This database is the result of the cooperative cataloguing activity of OCLC participating libraries, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the National Library of Medicine, the National Library of Canada, and the National Library of Australia. Over 34,000 records are added each week. Dates range from BC to the present. These bibliographic records for monographs, serials, AV media, maps, archives and manuscripts, sound recordings, scores and computer files include such information asDewey and Library of Congress classification as well as all fields required by AACR2. Library of Congress subject headings are included when appropriate and for medicine and related subjects medical subject headings are also given. There were 421 OCLC users in Europe. UKMARC records are not observably created outside the UK. In 1986 the Book Trade Electronic Data Interchange Standards Committee (BEDIS) was established in the U.K. to consider standards for bibliographic exchange. Their report, published in 1990, recommended the adoption of the MARC format to meet the requirements of publishers and booksellers for exchanging product and trading information relating to books. The principal reason for choosing MARC was its widespread use by library suppliers and by libraries both in the United Kingdom and overseas. Since then this work has been extended into Europe through the EDItEUR and EDILIBE projects. A 1995 UK workshop, Towards a Common MARC Format, identified a need for the UK to move towards adopting an extended form of USMARC for use in the UK. Work has already started on this in conjunction with the relevant bodies in the US and Canada, but it is felt that the final changeover will not take place till 1999. Work is ongoing on the harmonisation of USMARC. Recently UNIMARC has been chosen by many EU libraries as the exchange format of choice, and as the format for the CERL (Consortium of European Research Libraries) database of Hand Printed Books, merging data from different EU libraries. Other EC sponsored programmes related to MARC include USEMARCON, CoBRA-UNIMARC and CoBRA- CHASE. Further details available from: Much of the information in this section has been taken from the British Library's Setting the Record Straight: A guide to the MARC format(November 1995, updated June 1996), which provides a brief, non-technical guide to the MARC format. For further information on USMARC refer to the Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office site athttp://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/. For further information on UKMARC refer to the British Library National Bilbiographic Service (NBS) UKMARC Web Page at http://www.bl.uk/services/bsds/nbs/marc/. The Library of Congress maintains the USMARC formats for Bibliographic, Authority, Holdings, Classification, and Community Information data for the USMARC user community. The MARC Advisory Committee includes the American Library Association's (ALA) Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information (MARBI) committee, US national libraries, the National Library of Canada and the National Library of Australia, the large bibliographic networks such as OCLC and RLIN, library associations such as the Music Library Association and Special Libraries Association, and library system vendors. The Library of Congress maintains an electronic discussion forum for the formats that has around 800 subscribers, opening discussion to all interested librarians. The Canadian Committee on MARC (CCM) acts in an advisory capacity to the National Library of Canada on matters relating to Canadian MARC formats. The Committee, which was established in 1976, is formed of two representatives from each of the Canadian Library Association (CLA), the Association pour l'avancement des sciences et techniques de la documentation (ASTED) and the National Library of Canada as well as one member from ISM, one member representing the Bureau of Canadian Archivists and an observer from the Library of Congress. The Committee meets twice a year, in conjunction with the annual conferences of CLA and ASTED. A detailed description of the way in which ISO 2709 records are structured and used can be found in Chapter 2 of the EUORPAGATE Report. |
Object IdentificationArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
It should be noted that ISRC, ISMN, ISAN and ISWC are part of the Common Information System (CIS) initiated by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) and the International Federation of Phonograph Industries (IFPI), for addressing electronic copyright management requirements. Characteristics/description For printed and electronic music copyright ISMNs are used, while individual recordings of music can be identified using the ISRC coding scheme. Electronic information can be identified using the naming conventions defined in ISO 9070. Each of the standards listed above is administered by a Registration Authority that keeps master records of the owners of sets of records. Assignment of individual numbers within each set is normally the responsibility of the originating company. During 1995 a consortium consisting of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, IEEE and Elsevier Science published a specification for uniquely identifying individual papers in books and serials. The Publisher Item Identifier (PII) is a 17 character identifier which starts with either an ISSN number and year of publication (preceded by the letter S) or an ISBN number (preceded by the letter B). Individual papers within the publication are assigned a unique 5 digit number. The final character is a modulo 11 check digit (with X for 10) derived by multiplying each number (excluding the initial letter) by a prime and dividing the result by 11. The original version of ANSI/NISO Z39.56-1991 established two levels of coding, a unique code for the identification of a serial title called the Serial Item Identifier and a unique code for individual contributions within a serial - the Serial Contribution Identifier. The standard has recently been significantly revised to make it more suitable for electronic use, including in the EDI and Internet (Uniform Resource Names) environments. The main changes are the introduction of a Code Structure Identifier (CSI) for different uses, a Derivative Part Identifier (DPI) to identify fragments other than articles (e.g. tables of contents, index) and a Media Format Identifier (MFI) to indicate physical format. The DPI and MFI may be used in all SICI types (CSIs). However, the use of SICI remains confined to serials (a book-based version is expected shortly). Nor is SICI suitable for use prior to publication if the article is not assigned to a specific journal. To allow component parts of books to be identified in a way similar to SICI, the UK Book Industry Communication group has developed a proposal called A Standard Identifier for Book Items and Contributions, which is referred to as the BIC identifier (BICI). ISWC will provide a link between the existing ISRC used by the recording industry to identify individual audio and video recordings, and the ISAN, used to identify audiovisual works. It will also provide a bridge to an expanded database of Interested Party Identifiers (IPI) and International Standard Agreement Codes (ISAC). An ISWC number will consist of an eight digit number preceded by a T and followed by a check digit, e.g. ISWC T-34524680-1. The number itself will not contain any information about the composition or its composer/performer. Digital Object Identifiers can be used to identify any type of digital information. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system will connect customers, via the Internet or any future networks, to the current owner of a digital object. It provides a tool for facilitating management of copyright ownership issues and promoting digital commerce and scholarly research. It is a two-part identifier consisting of a registrant's prefix, issued to the owner of the content by a central DOI Agency, and an item ID. The item ID can be any existing object identification scheme, including ISBNs, SICI, BICI and PII identifiers. A distributed DOI Directory provides the link between the identifier and the location of the document. Usage (Market segment and penetration) The developers of the PII scheme will ensure that all papers that have been assigned a unique PII will have the number printed on each page published after 1st January 1996. In addition to the STI group of publishers, the PII has been adopted by Springer and other primary publishers as well as by their secondary databases including Chemical Abstracts, EMBase, INSPEC and ADONIS. ISWC standardisation is well advanced, with trials currently being conducted in Australia, Scandinavia and Ireland. UK trials will begin shortly. The ISWC work is being done by the International Numbering Working Group of the BIEM/CISAC Information Systems Steering Committee after extensive consultations with copyright societies and copyright owners in many different territories. The ISRC already links to existing physical packages of recordings by way of Uniform Product Code/European Article Number (UPC/EAN) product bar-codes. SICI (original version) is currently widely used, mainly at the item (i.e. issue) level, by subscription agents and libraries. It is an important element in EDI messaging and is used in many library systems. The identifier is represented in a bar code form using the EAN128 scheme. In 1996 the Association of American Publishers (AAP) established an initiative, known as the Digital Object Identifier, to devise an identification system specifically for copyright management of electronic information. The identifier would be embedded in the digital information product and users would enter it to submit a query to a central DOI database. The query would be routed to the publisher who would return a full record that would include both bibliographic and copyright status information. In September 1996, Bowker and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) won the contract to develop the DOI system and act as the management agency. There is as yet no agreement on the numbering system to be used. A group of publishers has begun implementing DOIs in a prototype, with a demonstration of the DOI System planned for the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1997. Further details available from: For details of the Publisher Item Identifier scheme contact Elsevier Science at http://www.elsevier.nl/inca/homepage/about/pii/. For details of the Digital Object Identifiers System contact http://www.doi.org. For an analysis of various identification schemes, see the work of the EC-sponsored BIBLINK project in this area (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/BIBLINK/wp2/). An overview of current developments in this field can be found in June/July edition of OII Spectrum. The Book Industry Communication (BIC) and EDItEUR jointly published a briefing paper on Unique Identifiers in September 1996 (ISBN 1 873671 16 4). A useful overview of current developments in the field of object identifiers can be found athttp://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/plaza/aao00/DouglasArmati/Speeches/ICSU_UNESCO_Speech.htm. A description of the CISAC/IFPI CIS scheme and other issues concerning electronic copyright management is provided in the OII report onWorkshop on Technical Mechanisms for IPR Management in the Information Society. A European Copyright User Platform (ECUP), a copyright awareness campaign for librarians, has been established by the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA) with support from the EU Libraries Programme. Further information is available at http://www.kaapeli.fi/~eblida/ecup/.
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OSI-ISP ALD1nExpanded nameOSI-ISP ALD1n Library and Documentation Search and Retrieve Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Part 2 will specify constraints to be applied when using the OSI Search and Retrieve Application Protocol Specification defined in ISO 10163-1:1993 to search through bibliographic information stored in MARC format. It requires that applications support the use of Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) for querying. Optionally search and retrieval using the FIND command defined in ISO 8777:1993 Information and documentation -- Commands for interactive text searching is permitted. Part 3 will identify how the minimal OSI (mOSI) profile for a Common Upper Layer Requirements (CULR) defined in ISO/IEC ISP 11188-3 and a connection oriented ISO 8649 Association Control Service Element (ACSE), as defined in ISO/IEC ISP 11188-1, can be used to search bibliographic databases. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
OSI-ISP ALD2nExpanded nameOSI-ISP ALD2n Library and Documentation Interlibrary Loan Store-and-Forward Protocols Area covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Part 2 lays down the general principles that apply to interlibrary loan messages. Part 3 identifies how the minimal OSI (mOSI) profile for a Common Upper Layer Requirements (CULR) defined in ISO/IEC DISP 11188-3and a connection oriented ISO 8649 Association Control Service Element (ACSE) service, as defined in ISO/IEC ISP 11188-1, can be used for interlibrary loan messages. Part 4 (ALD22) specifies how library applications should use the messaging facilities define in ISO 10021 Information technology -- Text Communication -- Message-Oriented Text Interchange Systems (MOTIS) (the ITU X.400 protocol) to exchange messages related to interlibrary loans. It requires that applications provide a delivery report service conforming to ISO/IEC 10021-7:1990 Information technology -- Text Communication -- Message-Oriented Text Interchange Systems (MOTIS) -- Part 7: Interpersonal Messaging System. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Further details available from: |
TransliterationArea covered Sponsoring body and standard details
Characteristics/description Note: Most of these standards have an equivalent standard for representing the characters without transliteration, as described under the heading Bibliographic Character Sets. Usage (Market segment and penetration) Note: Applications are migrating towards the use of ISO 10646 as the preferred general purpose character set for information interchange. This comprehensive character set will reduce the need to perform transliteration. Further details available from: For further details on problems relating to the transliteration of Greek refer to the results of the European Commission sponsored HELEN project that can be found at http://alcyone.cc.uch.gr/~kosmas/Helen/helen_docs.html |
This information set on OII standards is maintained by Martin Bryan of The SGML Centre and Man-Sze Li of IC Focus on behalf of European Commission DGXIII/E. File last updated: January 1998 |