The ITU Service Rich refers to is the TELEDOC Auto-Answer
Mailbox (TAM), I put a Users Guide up for anonymous FTP on
osi.ncsl.nist.gov (129.6.48.100) in
pub/oiw/dssig/CCITT-TeledocUserGuide.txt
Last I checked neither the X.500 nor F.500 docs were
there, but that may have changed.
The address for this service has changed: it is now
itudoc(_at_)itu(_dot_)ch(_dot_) I think the
old address still works but it is unclear how long it will continue to work.
As for the document store itself -- the good news is that documents are
starting to appear in it. In particular, the CMIP specs (X.710, X.711) and the
beginings of some security stuff (X.800) are there now. The bad news is that a
lot of the most important stuff (X.500, X.400, etc.) isn't there yet. (This
could be an artifact of my inability to use the indexing scheme, of course.)
Certainly the 1993
recommendations will be a while in coming.
This may or may not be the case. If the delay is in standardization of these
things, then you're right. But once things are standardized new documents
seem to be far more likely to appear than do old ones -- new documents are
more likely to be in the necessary formats to start with, whereas old
documents may be practically impossible to get online without essentially
keying them in from scratch. (Carl Malamud talks about this in his "Exploring
the Internet", as I recall.)
Ned