Diane,
>Ron, et al.:
>
>The qualifier in the LCSH heading, (Information retrieval system) is valid
>LCSH, and moreover, the presence of parenthetical qualifiers is common in
>LCSH. My guess is that it is not unknown in other standard subject
>schemes, though I'm not familiar enough with any others to cite cases.
>
>I don't know how you can restrict qualifiers from strings, and still be
>able to use LCSH, since the qualifier relationship to the rest of the
>string would be lost, and the sense of the string compromised. Or maybe I'm
>missing something?
Does LCSH use the term "qualifier"? If yes, please use the term "LCSH
qualifier" on this list to distinguish it from a DC qualifier. The DC
qualifiers are SCHEME and LANG and maybe TYPE (I'm not certain whether we
decided, in Canberra, to use the term "qualifier" in relation to TYPE).
"(Information retrieval system)" may be an LCSH qualifier. It is certainly
not a DC qualifier.
Ron was proposing that an element value not be allowed to start with the
character "(". For instance, this would be legal:
<meta name = "DC.subject"
content = "(scheme=LCSH) NOTIS (Information retrieval system)">
and this illegal:
<meta name = "DC.subject"
content = "(scheme=LCSH) (Information retrieval system)">
Yesterday I proposed a syntax which would allow the second example, using
an empty qualifier-value pair:
>Lee wrote:
>
>>How do you deal with a title that starts with parentheses?
>>Some real examples were given in Canberra.
>
>My favourite syntax says that if the data starts with a "(", you must prefix
>it with an empty qualifier-value pair, eg:
>
><meta name = "DC.xyz" content = "() (I need to think about this)">
>
><meta name = "DC.xyz" content = "(q1=v1) () (I need to think about this)">
>
><meta name = "DC.xyz" content = "(q1=v1) (q2=v2) () (I need to think about this)">
If this is too difficult for the average user, let's keep it in the Advanced
section of the Help page!
Misha
