I think the point I most need to clarify here is what the DC-Citation
Working Group was addressing: it was "how can we put the Journal, Volume,
Issue and Page information about an article into a DC record". This is all
we meant by "the citation". (It was also argued that Cover Identifier, such
as May 2000, Spring 2000, or whatever, should go into this same record, but
that's another issue.) It was never the intention to say that an article
doesn't also have other metadata included in its DC record, such as
dc:creator, dc:title, and so on. The full record clearly includes all of
these, but we were addressing the very specific problem of where do you put
stuff like "Statistics in Medicine, Volume 18, Issue 21, pages:2815-2829"
*in one place* in a DC record so that it can be pulled out as the citation,
in the very limited sense of "citation equals this information".
I agree that someone could set up a Citation Profile, defining the required
order of elements and even appropriate punctuation, but you can't do this
within DC as it stands: it would have to be done as an application
profile/set of local extensions. We wanted to recommend how you could do
this in DC *without* needing a separate application profile.
The building of such a profile would be a separate activity - maybe even
the next one that the Citation WG should address, but to do this requires
the proposal of a charter to the Advisory Committee of the DCMI for their
approval. I don't personally have the time to do this, but I'm sure there
are many that do!
I have copied this to the dc-citation mail-list since I think this is still
the most appropriate forum for discussing such issues - maybe you could all
take this as an invitation to consider whether the WG should be convened
under a new charter: I think we've just about beaten the original charter
to death. Stu Weibel and Traugott Koch's recent article in D-Lib
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/weibel/12weibel.html) suggests three
open issues for the Citation WG:
1) extension to conference proceedings etc.
2) controlled vocabularies, e.g. for journal abbreviations
3) linking initiatives, e.g. CrossRef
Would anyone out there like to take up the challenge(s) of chartering these
or any other open issues?
Cliff
David Dorman <[log in to unmask]>@JISCMAIL.AC.UK> on 24/12/2000 13:17:55
Please respond to David Dorman <[log in to unmask]>
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Core effo <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: Citations
All the discussions about how to deal with citations I heard at DC8 or
read on this list assume that a citation is an entity that has to go
into a specific DC Element. All the points of view I encountered only
differed on which Element a citation should go into.
But why must a citation be dealt with as an irreducible entity that can
only be put into one element? After all, a citation has many specific
elements that are put together in such a way as to make a citation.
Each of those elements is quite distinct from the others and has its own
definition.
Why not take the approach of deciding where each citation element should
go in DC? Once this is determined, then a Citation Profile (or set of
profiles) could be developed and published that would consist of a list
of those element included in the profile, instructions about the order
in which those elements would be displayed, as well as the punctuation
that would populate the citation. This approach would preserve the
modular characteristic of DC, thereby also giving a great deal of
flexibility in dealing with all the citation variations that exist now
and will evolve in the future. This approach would also put the display
functionality in the software that parses the DC metadata, rather than
embedding it directly in a DC Element.
Such an approach could serve as a model for any other predefined set of
DC Elements and Qualifiers that a particular community might want to
define and use for a particular purpose.
--
David Dorman
Consultant, Lincoln Trail Libraries
Contributing Editor, American Libraries
217-352-0047 (work)
217-344-2174 (home)
217-352-7153 (fax)
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