The April Berkeley discussion on <note> was pretty long. Having thought,
too, that <note> with a <head> was useful, here's why I, at least, agreed
to give it up in the end .... each example we thought of could have been
handled with another tag that seemed more specific about the content of
the data. Sharon Thibodeau recalled the "Other Descriptive Data" tag
(although that means shifting some data to later sequence in a finding aid
text ... after ScopeContent and AdminInfo), and also the <frontmatter> tag
for prefatory information about how to use a finding aid or overview of
what it covers.
It's very useful and interesting to hear how attractive the <note> element
appears. Although you've found a work-around through the label attribute,
would the <odd> or <frontmatter> tags also suffice for your circumstances?
Does it concern many people that large chunks of finding aid texts might
be tagged as <note> with a <head>? (Maybe others who were at Berkeley
could describe more of the advantages to a headless note, or, when Daniel
gets back from vacation we can hear more.)
-- Helena
On Sat, 22 Jun 1996, David Clough wrote:
> MacKenzie,
>
> here at Yale, we found it useful to have <head> in <note> too, to
> allow some flexibility for squeezing in an 'Overview' section at the
> beginning of finding aids in two of our repositories. Taking out the
> <head> element certainly isn't an error, it was a deliberate and
> documented change in the beta dtd. I'm not clear why.
>
> The good news is that there is way to work around this. You can
> display a heading for a <note> element by displaying the value of its
> 'label' attribute. So instead of something like
>
> <note>
> <head>Further Information</head>
> ...
> </note>
>
> you can use the more compact, but more involved
>
> <note label="Further Information">
> ...
> </note>
>
> and then specify in the style sheet that if the label attribute for a
> note element is assigned, it should be displayed as a heading.
>
> ----
> David L. Clough
> Reference Assistant, Yale Divinity Library
> 409 Prospect Street, New Haven CT 06511, USA
> email [log in to unmask] tel. (203) 432-5289
>
> MacKenzie Smith wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm writing a conversion program for an old DataEase database into
> > EAD-encoded finding aids, and need to use <note> elements for
> > general purpose fields that probably should go into <bioghist> or
> > <scopecontent> kinds of elements but can't because we don't know
> > for sure without manually looking at their contents. In the draft
> > tag library it says you can have <head> elements in <note>s, and
> > an earlier beta version of the DTD allowed this, but the newest
> > one does not. Was that a conscious decision? Or a mistake in the
> > new DTD? It seems pretty useful to me to have headings available
> > in note elements, don't you think?
> >
> > _____________________________________________________________________________
> > MacKenzie Smith [log in to unmask]
> > Office for Information Systems (617)495-3724
> > Harvard University Library %\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
Helena Zinkham phone: (202) 707-2922
Prints & Photographs Div. fax: (202) 707-6647
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