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Annex A

(informative)

Guidelines for Private Agreements

Private agreements limit the scope of transfer and are discouraged. Recurring needs for similar private agreements with a significant number of users should be referred to the maintenance organization of the standard.

The inclusion of ancillary data should be accomplished within the framework of ISO 8211 by defining private tags, names and labels. Inasmuch as ISO 8211 permits the association of tags within records, there is no need to compromise the tags and labels of this standard and conforming software. The following guidelines insure that no compromise will exist:

a) Do not use the tags, names and labels of this standard with any other meaning or with controls not specified for use with them.

b) Define private agreement tags, names and labels as a completely separate set using lower case characters and in full compliance with ISO 8211.

c) Users anticipating the participation in private agreements should design software processing tags and fields within the context of ISO 8211 and subfields within the context of this standard.

d) Use the 0002 tag of ISO 8211 in the DDR to describe the nature of the private agreement and to alert the recipient of the presence of the agreement.