A review of metadata: a survey of current resource description formats

A review of metadata: a survey of current resource description formats
Work Package 3 of Telematics for Research project DESIRE (RE 1004)

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.

Constituency of use

US technical community.

Ease of creation

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.

Progress towards international standardisation

RFC 1807 is not a standard in IETF terms, it is a memo.

Other comments

Programs have been written to map between RFC 1807 records and structured USMARC cataloguing records, and also from USMARC to this RFC.

Format issues

Designation

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.

Content

Basic descriptive elements

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)

Subject description

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.

URIs

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).

Resource format and technical characteristics

No separate fields.

Host administrative details

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.

Administrative metadata

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.