On Thu, 20 Feb 1997 10:13:09 -0500 Bill Landis wrote:

> Rich Szary posted an interesting musing to this list in April of 1996
> concerning the uses of the <c..> tags at Yale. In it he talked a bit
> about the potential dangers of using the level attribute to record both
> logical and physical groupings.  This made a lot of sense to me and I
> have approached my tagging experiments with the notion that not using
> level to record physical containment (box, folder, etc.) is a good
> thing. Richard Higgins' tagging examples raise, for me, an interesting
> question about whether "file" is being used to record intellectual or
> physical containment.  I suspect that some international differences
> about what we call the intellectual groups into which we subdivide our
> fonds/record groups is at work in my lack of understanding about this.
>
True.  I don't use physical containers for <C__> myself, but when I use "file", "bundle" etc it reflects a
unit created by the originator (e.g. file of documents relating to legal case or bundle of estate accounts
and vouchers for 1787). Most of the material I have listed goes down to item level, although this can be a
bit hazy too - does level="item" mean a description of a single item or a description of twenty items in
one <did>?

I find the numbers in <C__> tags invaluable for keeping track of where you are.  By no means do the
same <C__> levels correspond between different handlists, or even within them.  If you have time to
download it try

http://www.dur.ac.uk/Library/asc/sgml/macdon.sgml

which goes, I think, down to <C07> at times.  The presentation is no problem when you just indent each
level in relation to its parent, and the navigator really comes into its own.

Richard Higgins
Durham University Library