 Moreover, the “Nancy style” represents international guidelines developed by a corporate author (GLISC), which worked on the draft proposed by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, and signed approval of this best practice on behalf of their respective organizations, while the ANSI/NISO Z39.18 is a national standard approved by the American National Standards Institute through a number of Voting Members.The “Nancy style” is mostly paper oriented giving recommendations on report preparation mainly reflecting a traditional paper structure, while the organization pattern of the ANSI/NISO Z39.18 is user-based more than content-based.The key concepts incorporated in the American standard mainly refer to metadata, persistence of links, interoperability, creation, discovery/retrieval, presentation in digital format (DTD, XML, XSL), maintenance and preservation (original content, software and media); it also contains a metadata schema, which is absent in the Guidelines.