The agenda for the three days will be fairly flexible, adjusting to meet the requirements of actually producing a draft document by the end of the meeting. As well as the formal time spent in Bath, issues related to this Profile will be aired in a session at the ZIG in Stockholm during the previous week, and input from this session will also be used to refine the agenda.
Despite the difficulty of defining a comprehensive agenda for this process, certain basic areas of work can be usefully laid out:
Day One
- Agreement on scope and purpose of the Profile
Much of this work has been done in exchanges on the ZIP-PIZ-L list, and in teleconferences. An hour or two could usefully be spent at the beginning of the meeting to clearly express this scope, and to ensure that all participants are agreed.
- Sign Off on the low-hanging fruit
Certain parts of the Profile are likely to be uncontentious, and may be lifted relatively easily from existing work such as the Texas Profile. A document will be available in advance of the meeting which lays out these straightforward issues, and the majority of the first day will be spent in debating these and accepting as many as feasible for incorporation into the Profile.
Days Two and Three
Work items for the remaining time will very much be governed by successes on Day One. We anticipate that the 'easy' work related to searching of OPAC-like resources, and returning MARC-flavour records, will be largely complete by the end of the first day, and the beginning of Day Two will be spent finishing off this work. Attention will then turn to other aspects of the Profile, including:
- GRS record syntaxes
An exploration of issues surrounding returning records for non-bibliographic resources.
- Holdings Information
An exploration of issues surrounding the use and return of OPAC holdings details.
- Searching non-bibliographic resources
Exploring the use of the Profile in a cross-domain, non-bibliocentric, environment, and identifying issues in need of resolution.
Each of these topics is important to the long-term success of the Profile in many of the environments in which it is likely to be deployed. We will need to be careful, though, in defining work items which can be usefully advanced in the time available, and it will be important not to hold back the Profile as a whole through becoming bogged down in unresolvable problems in these areas. The ultimate goal is to leave Bath with a draft document suitable for submitting to the ZIG mailing list and elsewhere for peer review and experimental deployment.
Z39.50 Interoperability Profile