The full report includes a listing of all ISO internationally agreed standards applicable in the storage area, together with a description of the standards agreement process and contacts for all listed national standards bodies.

Standards are increasingly specific and the demand for a coherent set of guidelines forthe digital area is increasing.

Currently there is a deficiency in standards for optical media players, but groups suchas T11 have been set-up specifically to deal with these issues.

The SC23 co-ordinating group has been set up under the ISO/IEC JTC-1 umbrella tostandardise digital storage media for information interchange. Much of their output andanalysis of future requirements is of relevance to this study. From their report of24/09/2004v, the trend is for specific ISO standards to be developed to cover newoptical storage formats and write speeds, in contrast the standards for magnetic mediaare being set by the dominant companies in the areas (see below for an analysis of proprietary tools).