Ray is recently retired from the Library of Congress where he spent the past 36 years, during which he was the principal author or editor of many bibliographic related protocols and schemes including Z39.50; SRU/CQL; MODS, MADS, and PRIMIS XML Schemas; and EDTF (the Extended Date and Time format, developed at the Library of Congress, which is an integral part of ISO 8601-2019 Part 2 - Extensions) and several IETF RFCs.

He has contributed to the development of many other ISO, NISO, IETF, and W3C standards and has represented LC in the W3C for the past 20 years. For the past several years he has been the principal ontologist for the development of BIBFRAME (the bibliographic framework based on linked data and RDF, to eventually replace the MARC bibliographic format).

Although retired, Ray remains engaged with several of these efforts. Ray was the Convenor of ISO/TC 154/WG 5 from 2018 to 2019/04.