Z39.50 in the Stanford Informal Standard
Reported by Eliot Christian (US Geological Survey)

Problems Addressed:

The Stanford Digital Library project is pursuing an informal standards
effort with regard to query language, metadata, and ranking across servers.
This BOF addressed the relationship of the draft proposal to the Z39.50
standard for information search and retrieval.  The major issue raised is
that the Stanford proposal borrows extensively from Z39.50, but does not 
yet address use of the Z39.50 protocol per se.

Related Standards/Scope

Stanford's proposal references SOIF's in addition to Z39.50, as well as
the GILS profile.

Priority and time frame

The issue of employing Z39.50 in the context of the problems addressed by
the Stanford proposal is of high priority.  A solution should be achievable 
within six months.

Statement of Required Work

The Z39.50 Implementors Group community will help Stanford produce a Z39.50
Profile for their proposal, and two alternative implementations--one using
ASCII encoding and the other using Basic Encoding Rules (BER).