The aim of the IT 19 Committee is to clone, wherever possible, international ISO standards but this is not always appropriate to electronic applications in the library and information industry. Many relevant standards are being developed under the auspices of ANSI, the US standards making body, many of which become ISO standards in the fullness of time. We were aware from our work within the IT19 Committee that the preparation of a report on a electronic publishing standards would not be an easy task for a number of reasons. There is as yet no model covering the complete spectrum of electronic publishing so the boundaries are extremely difficult to establish. This is because standards very often reflect people's preconceptions and predispositions.
Stakeholders create standards and thus the seeds of conflict are sown.
It is therefore necessary to interpret standards in context. Details of the environment are often elusive, or inaccessible, to the users of standards because they are not parties to the standards-making process and therefore do not understand its dynamics, whether general or specific to a particular standard. It is thus necessary to emphasise the conceptual framework that provides boundaries and structure to the interplay of standards which are often competing. The key drivers underlying this definition are that the information should be reusable, integrated and be amenable to loss free interchange. In accepting such a definition, we were deeply aware that it could be applied to be a wide range of publishing environments, only a few of which were of direct interest to the AVCC Working Party.