I just want to note that neither TeX/BibTeX nor TEI are bibliographic
metadata formats. They are both designed for the encoding of full text.
One CAN choose to adhere to different requirements in full text and
citation metadata, due to the difference in their functions. As an
example, libraries have used transliteration in their bibliographic
metadata as a response to the need to create queries in systems with
only ASCII text capabilities and standard keyboards, and to allow
interfiling of works in different scripts. But you would probably not
choose to do transliteration of an entire text under most circumstances.
So we should keep the purposes of our metadata in mind when working on
solutions. As a matter of fact, a good requirements analysis would
probably be very helpful. Even if we couldn't agree, we would get
everyone's needs out on the table.
kc
Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> On Mar 31, 2005, at 11:31 AM, Timothy W. Cole wrote:
>
>> But it'd be a shame if MODS didn't at least anticipate the basic
>> content needs and build in early on the facility to deal with them.
>
>
> My question here, of course, came out of discussions with more
> scientific end-users, who do math. In that world, TeX (and BibTeX)
> reigns supreme. Part of the reason is an almost-cult-like loyalty to
> TeX that's not always rational (hmm ... maybe like MARC in the library
> world?). But there's of course the practical issue that you can embed
> equations and macros and such in BibTeX fields. So when I talk to
> these people, they tend to say "why should I bother with an XML
> bibliographic format that's more verbose than BibTeX, but can't do
> math?"
>
> And then I talk to the humanities people from the TEI community who say
> "but a bibliographic format that can't even do inline markup of titles
> isn't a REAL bibliographic format" (I'm paraphrasing, but I did have
> someone tell me virtually that). I can of course point out to them all
> the ways MODS is better-designed than the TEI model, but they have a
> point on this issue.
>
> I'm even finding online journal databases these days resorting to the
> awkwardness of adding HTML tags to plain text export formats; e.g.:
>
> T1 - Some <i>Title</i> with a Title
>
> Bruce
>
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