Re: ISO Documents

[John Day <[e-mail]>]

At 23:07 -0400 7/1/99, Michael Mealling wrote:
>Al Costanzo said this:
>> Does anyone know if these documents exist anywhere online?
>> I looked at the ISO website to no avail.
>> They are:
>>
>> [ISO3166-1] ISO 3166-1:1997 Codes for the representation of names of
>> countries and their subdivisions -- Part 1: Country codes.
>
>http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/codlstp1.html
>
>Note that ISO making something like this publicly available is very rare.
>
>> [ISO3166-2] ISO/DIS 3166-2 Codes for the representation of names of
>> countries and their subdivisions -- Part 2: Country subdivision code.
>
>I've been talking to the 3166 Maintenance Agency and they have no
>immediate intention of making 3166-2 available online. There are
>also no electronic versions available at all. I'm talking to
>someone at ANSI about the rumored existence of a PDF version but
>so far nothing substantive has been found.
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions for how to try and convince ISO
>to make 3166-2 available as well?
>
This is something that ISO has never understood.  The primary reason is
that ISO gets most of their income from selling documents, unlike ITU which
gets most of their income from the phone companies.  In general, if the
committee responsible for the standard asks ISO to make the document
available on-line, they will.  I know that it has been done for some
standards, especially those like X.500 which have lots of ASN and
electronic versions avoid transcription errors.  This might take some time.
However, JTC1 has been slowly trying to be more responsive, so they may
have procedures in place that will make it easier.  I haven't kept up with
all their changes.

I suggest that you contact ANSI.  In particular, you should ask for the
Secretariat of the committee responsible for the work.  Start with, Lisa
Rajchel, the Secretariat of JTC1 which is the parent for all of the IT
committees.

Take care,
John Day