RFC 1357 (rfc1357) - Page 3 of 13
A Format for E-mailing Bibliographic Records
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1357 Format for E-mailing Bibliographic Records July 1992 META FORMAT ----------- * Keep It Simple. * One bibliographic record for each publication, where a "publication" is whatever the publishing institution defines as such. * A record contains several fields. * Each field starts with its tag (aka the field-ID) which is a reserved identifier (containing no separators) at the beginning of a new line with or without spaces before it), followed by two colons ("::"), followed by the field data. * Continuation lines: Lines are limited to 79 characters. When needed, fields may continue over several lines, with an implied space in between. In order to simplify the use no special marking is used to indicate continuation line. Hence, fields are terminated by a line that starts (apart from white space) with a word followed by two colons. Except for the "END::" that is terminated by the end of line.) For improved human readability it is suggested to start continuation lines with some spaces. * Several fields are mandatory and must appear in the record. All fields (unless specifically not permitted to) may be in any order and may be repeated as needed (e.g., the AUTHOR field). The order of the repeated fields is always preserved. * Only printable ASCII characters may be used. Hence, the permissible characters are ASCII codes 040 (Space) through 176(~) and line breaks which are \012 (LF) or \012\015 (CRLF). Empty lines indicate paragraph break. \009 (tab) must be replaced by spaces before submission. This specifically forbids tabs, null characters, DEL, backspaces, etc. (i.e., if used, the record is invalid.) Throughout this document the word "publisher" means the publishing organization of a report (e.g., a university or a department thereof), not necessarily an organization authorized to issue ISBN numbers. Cohen (ed.)
