Ann Apps raised several points in her note about citations that deserve
attention (and effort) by those concerned with capturing citations using DC.
First and foremost, her commendation of the efforts of Cliff Morgan are well
deserved. Cliff took on the Citation working group at a time when the
problem was confounded by our evolving notions of how structured values
should be encoded in DC. The difficulty in reaching closure on this problem
has been a problem of the evolving understanding of the use of metadata
values with substructure as well as the intrinsic complexity of the problem
to begin with.
In answer to the question 'Is there interest in taking citation work
further?' I hope there will be a strongly affirmative answer. There is a
clear need for machine parsable citation information that can be easily
extracted from DC records. Yes, they should be human-readable, but it is
also critical that they should be reliably parseable.
I'd like to endorse the proposal that an application profile be developed by
a small group of citation enthusiasts (that is, people who have
responsibilities for actual systems), and that these folks work the results
of the DC-Citation recommendations and with a representative of the Usage
committee to keep any recommendations in line with the general principles of
the DCMI metadata architecture.
If you've read this far in this note, AND you feel you have experience-based
insight with both DC and citation problems, AND you are interested in
working on and testing a practical, interoperable solution, please notify me
with a phone call or an email message this week with a subject line of:
CITATION APPLICATION PROFILE
This problem needs to be solved.
regards
stu
-----Original Message-----
From: Ann Apps [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 9:00 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Citations
Dear fellow DC folk,
I am sending this to dc-general rather than dc-citation because I
think there may be people interested in the citation issue who are
not subscribed to dc-citation. In fact, I think the citation issue
should be of interest to most DC people. How to capture the
bibliographic citation of a resource, specifically a journal article, is
not just a niche publishing issue but of importance in all sectors
such as libraries, education (where a journal article is an
educational resource), etc.
[log in to unmask] wrote:
> 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
>
Other issues which spring to mind are: extension to other genres
such as books, reports, theses, ....; author affiliation (this is the
author's affiliation pertaining to the resource not necessarily her/his
current address; a journal article type; and the development of a
Citation Profile as suggested in one or two recent messages (both
for capturing a bibliographic record and for reference linking).
And of course the DC-Citation Working Group's recommendation
still hasn't been ratified. Does this mean there is really little interest
in this issue within the DC community in general?
The version issue was also unresolved - it just turned into 'pass the
parcel' between DC element working groups! This is a completely
separate issue from the citation one and lumping them together
has caused much confusion. Version control should also be of
interest across most sectors. [I still believe there should be a
DC.Version element :) ]
Is there any interest in taking the citation further? It seems to me
that if there is no DC consensus as to how to capture a citation,
then everyone who has a need to create metadata for this will
simply 'do their own thing'. There are already several divergent
initiatives and probably many local intiatives. I would guess that
most of these are essentially the same but using different labels for
the fields of a citation record. This seems a pity when DC provides
us with a forum for consensus. I would like to keep my own
development work in line with current best practice but generally
don't have time for long drawn out discussions - things have to be
implemented fairly quickly.
It does seem that there is a fundamental problem with trying to
define a citation in some structured way within a DC element, the
minimalist / structuralist dichotomy. Some of the DC community
believe that DC should be for simple resource discovery only and
this should always be so. Thus information like a bibliographic
record should just be an unstructured human readable text string (I
don't dispute the idea that it should be human readable which is
why I'm not keen on some of the cryptic field labels suggested by
other initiatives). This precludes the use of DC for any application
which requires the content of an element to be machine parsable.
My personal opinion is that DC should be capable of evolving to
encompass the wider uses it now has, without obviating its use for
simple resource discovery. But if the minimalist view is the
generally accepted one then there is no point in taking the citation
issue any further.
Within my own work I am interested in creating an application
profile. I think that if there was a general DC citation profile this
could be extrapolated for use within particluar applications. Is there
any interest in developing such a profile, or maybe two - a
bibliographic record one and a reference linking one? Although this
looks to me like the way forward, I have little idea how to actually
create an application rpofile, particularly a machine readable one.
I think Cliff Morgan should be thanked for the excellent work he did
in leading the DC-Citation working group, and identifying a final
recommendation. I'm sorry that he no longer has time to continue
this work. Time is a problem for everyone associated with DC. I
guess we all have full time jobs. Some of us, who are dependent on
project funding to remain in employment, also have some issues
over how much unfunded work we can do on top of our normal
workload.
So is there any interest in continuing development of the citation
issue? If there is it would seem a good idea for discussion to take
place on the [log in to unmask] maillist, even though the
DC-Citation working group as was has now been closed.
Best wishes and Happy New Year to all.
Ann
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Mrs. Ann Apps. Electronic Publishing @ MIMAS. Manchester Computing,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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