BABEL II‐ An account of the second conference on data standards for electronic data interchange in the book world

The second BABEL conference provided the opportunity for the five working parties of BEDIS to present their draft reports and recommendations. The five areas covered by the working parties were: publisher's bibliographic databases; a standard short title record; commercial messages (e.g. orders); sales data statistics; and standard address numbers. To readers of VINE with automated systems, the area of most interest will be commercial messages, and indeed it is in this area that the most progress has been made. For this reason, an account of the sessions concerned with commercial messages is given first, followed by a summary of the other sessions.