On Fri, 25 Apr 1997 16:33:19 -0500 (EST) "Ray Denenberg
(Library of Congress)" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >From: "Rebecca S. Guenther" <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> >
> >We were planning to register .mrc for MARC, but had not been able to
> >figure out what to put in the IANA form. We will look at it again and try
> >to get it done. Since MARC is a record structure and the various flavors
>...
>
> Rebecca -- I want to point out that there are ISO object identifiers for many
> of the marc formats, specifically:
>
> Unimarc 1.2.840.10003.5.1
>...
> These object identifiers are intended for general use, not specific to Z39.50.
> The fact that they are registered on the Z39.50 tree is simply an
> administrative mechanism with no protocol significance.
Ray, this is helpful, but I don't know that it answers
Rebecca's question (and confuses me as a non-expert, which
is most likely my problem, not yours). The OIDs are not
especially user-friendly, but are certainly usable if that
is what the user community would find most convenient.
But what would you propose as a MIME [registration] format?
The existing standard makes it at least inconvenient, if
not impossible, to use an OID directly as a MIME type --
MIME types are expected to be alphanumeric and, normally,
to carry at least some mneumonic significance. One could
have
application/MARC; OID="1.2.840.10003.5.nnn"
or
application/MARC; Form=aaaaaaaa
(I'm assuming here that MARC is important enough that we
would want to standardize the use, rather than treating it
as a vendor or individual type.)
or those could actually be combined or made alternatives in
a single registration. That isn't something I'd
particularly recommend unless there was compelling need --
multiple ways to do the same thing usually leads to
interoperability problems-- but it is feasible.
What would you recommend we do here?
john
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