On Monday, August 18, 2003, at 03:00 PM, Barbara B Tillett wrote:
> As a reminder, the Chicago Manual of Style has just come out in a new
> edition, and it might be helpful to try to stay in synch with their
> recommended elements of a standard citation.
Yes, I finally got a copy it, and it is indeed a fantastic source of
information and examples.
I'm really busy these days, but I have a few observations about the
intersections of MODS and bibliographic formatting.
The Chicago Manual includes citation examples from what I would guess
are about 50 different kinds of sources. Many of these are impossible
to accurately represent in the formats used by existing bibliographic
software: Endnote, BibTeX, etc. MODS, however, can handle them
gracefully because of its sound structure.
I had speculated that formatting could rely almost exclusively on the
structure of MODS records. By this logic, a song on an album would be
formatted the same as a chapter in a book because they are each parts
with relatedItem "hosts" that are monographs.
Looking through the Chicago Manual, for the most part my guess was
correct. However, in various circumstances, one cannot rely on the
structure alone, and must fall back on genre information. A legal
article, for example, is formatted fundamentally differently than all
other articles. This is unfortunate, as it complicates formatting.
As for MODS, beyond the solid metadata structure, I think the
displayLabel attribute can be really useful for citation purposes; for
example, the already-mentioned "Paper presented at..." or "Document
available in..." notes can be handled with this attribute. I have to
look more closely, but I still remember I thought there was another
element or two that ought to have this attribute available.
One question I had was this:
Online sources include the url information and access date. MODS
allows urls to be stored with the identifier "uri" element. My
question is, how to code MODS in such a way that an xslt engine could
know when to include url information, and which information to include.
Consider this example from the MODS user guide:
<identifier type="uri" displayLabel="Active site (if available)">
http://www.franulmer.com/</identifier>
<identifier type="uri" displayLabel="Archived
site">http://wayback-cgi1.alexa.com/e2002/*/http://www.franulmer.com/</
identifier>
I see no way to code these in such a way that I'd only pick the correct
url for citations. According to the Chicago Manual, neither of these
is correct, actually, and one would instead want the url along with an
access date and accompanying display label (actually, I wouldn't want
to rely on the displayLabel here, because this information is presented
differently depending on the style).
Any creative ideas here? The only solution I can come up with is that
MODS records for citations can only include one url, which doesn't seem
a good solution to me. Also, how to represent an access date?
Bruce
|