Many CORBA services (such as the Naming Service and Trading Service) need to store large numbers of Interoperable Object References (IORs) as strings in a database. CORBA 2.1 defines an interoperable string representation for IORs which results in strings that are needlessly large. This paper describes an alternative encoding for stringified IORs which is more compact, retains the printable nature of stringified IORs, is extensible to allow other encodings to be added in the future, and can co-exist with the current encoding in the same ORB. We also provide an implementation of the proposed encoding.