On Thu, 24 Apr 1997, Jon Knight wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Apr 1997, Rebecca S. Guenther wrote:
> > A possible pared down list of standard resource types:
> > Text ("book" or "journal" deals more with publication pattern
> > than resource type; both are text)
>
> I think I see what you're getting at but I've a feeling that people want
> to know if something is a book or a journal (why else would you have ISBNs
> and ISSNs or separate catalogues in OPACs otherwise?). Text is a pretty
> wide ranging label.
We spend an awful lot of time trying to determine whether an item is a
monograph (i.e. book) or a serial (i.e. journal). Since these distinctions
have more to do with publication pattern (a book is a one-time thing,
while a serial goes on forever) rather than content, are they really all
that useful to indicate for our purposes? The distinction is not always
clear.
> > > (the following four are specific forms of text):
> > Thesis
> > Dictionary
> > Advertisement
> > Manual
>
> So are these covered under Text just as Book and Journal are or are you
> proposing that these are some how more special than "book" and "journal"
> and require their own TYPE value? If so, why? A thesis or a dictionary
> is after all just text (and in fact are usually subsets of the class
> "book"). Or is it that Text should really be "miscellaneous text" or
> "uncharacterised text"?
I just picked these out from your list as types that could be easily
determined and perhaps useful to bring out. They are subsets of text.
I'm not sure that thesis is all that important, though.
> > Dataset
> > Image
> > Music
>
> Fine.
>
> > Email message
>
> Isn't that Text as well? What about USENET postings? Mail archives?
> Gets icky doesn't it?
Sure, but what would be useful to bring out is that it is more
ephemeral than "published" material (whatever publishing may mean on the
Internet). It is not really meant to be a "document" and saved (if it
were, it would probably be at an FTP or Web site).
> > As with other qualifiers, we may need a short general list that we can all
> > agree upon and then use extensions (in this case scheme=whatever) for the
> > more comprehensive list that particular applications use.
>
> Why do the phrases "short general list" and "that we can all agree upon"
> worry me? :-) :-) :-)
For good reason. Probably an impossible task...
Rebecca
>
> Tatty bye,
>
> Jim'll
>
> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
> Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
> * I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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