The American National Standards Institute is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1918. It promulgates thousands of standards which propose guidelines--"norms"--for many different kinds of public, commercial and industrial activities. These are voluntary standards, and may not be universally adopted or even widely adopted, but as the ANSI website states, the objective of the standards is to improve both U.S. competitiveness and quality of life.
ANSI Standard Z39.29 deals with references for use in bibliographies or end-of-work lists. Its objective was to ensure enough information was provided to identify the work cited within a consistent but flexible format. It is considered essential that footnotes and bibliographies identify works cited unambiguously, while providing readers and researchers only with necessary and relevant information. The current version of the standard was promulgated in 2005.
The types of information captured by bibliographic references are sometimes called "elements." Among the elements covered by the ANSI standard are authorship, title, edition, imprint, physical description and series (i.e., volume number). Not all these elements are required by the standard in every case of citation. Clearly, some works cited would not have series numbers, and many works are published in only one edition. For many purposes, a physical description of the work would be unnecessary. The ANSI standard requires logical presentation of the bibliographic elements. In line with bibliographic standards generally, the ANSI standard mandates beginning a reference with the names of the authors. The other elements follow.
The current ANSI standard seeks to set guidelines for many kinds of data in addition to printed books and publications. It describes, for example, a format for Internet citations, and also offers guidelines for citing movies and musical works, photographs and maps, as well as electronic databases, CD-ROMs, email, listserv and Usenet groups and telephone conversations.
An example of an extensive ANSI standard reference--in this case, to a book containing information about the standard--would be as follows: Peter J. Hanjal (editor), International Information, 2nd ed., Libraries Unlimited Inc., Colorado, 2001, Volume 2. This citation sets out, in order, authorship (in this case, editorship), title information, edition, imprint and series information.