Issue raised by: Mark Wilson Tue, 19 Nov 1996 11:28:34 -0500
Appendix 8 of Z39.50 says that the requestedItem of an Item Order request may be "a request whose format is defined externally, and which may be an Interlibrary Loan Request APDU of ISO 10161". Does Z39.50 Item Order mandate an ASN.1 BER package or can EDIFACT or Base64 encoding be used for the contained ILL APDU package?
The 'itemRequest' is typed EXTERNAL and as such is certainly not constrained (by Z39.50) to be ASN.1 BER. If the itemRequest is an ILL APDU and the external uses OID 1.0.10161.2.1 then it is constrained to be ASN.1, but not constrained to be BER; it can be EDIFACT, as provided by the ILL standard. If BER is used, the BER encoding may be wrapped in Base64 (in store and forward mode).
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