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On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 09:58 AM, Rebecca S. Guenther wrote: > On the second question, I was going to answer the same way that Suzanne > did. The record describes a given resource with an identifier. The > resource was accessed on a particular date and is being described in > terms > of how it appeared on that date. So is there really a need to link > them? > The only situation I can think of when you might want to associate the > date with an identifier is if you are giving more than one URI and you > accessed them on different dates-- maybe a mirror site or something. If > people think it important to enable linking the dateAccessed with the > identifier, we could use the ID and IDref constructs available in XML > as > attributes to dateAccessed and Identifier, which would provide a > linking > mechanism. I don't necessarily mean literally linking them via ID and IDrefs (though that's certainly possible). Maybe there's another way? I do not personally see using more than one url in a record (though I suppose I could see have an html file and a pdf as links), so it is not perhaps an issue for me personally. I just think it might introduce inconsistencies to have an access date that is by definition associated with a specific URL, but then allow more than one URL. In the user guide, there is this example: <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> OK, so you add: <dateAccessed>2002-03-12</dateAccessed> ..but there's no way to know for sure which URL(s) -- the first, the second, or both -- the access date refers to, nor for an xslt formatted engine to know which to use for a citation. Yes, you could search for the display label value, but this is not a good idea because it will be a) specific to an institution or user, and b) prone to error. So I guess there are two ways to look at this. One is that this is a non-issue. Another is...ah, Karen's message just popped into my box. She said: > I can imagine the "date accessed" being an attribute of the URL, > rather than being treated as an attribute of the citation as a whole. > You may also have a bibliographic date on the item. This would be my preference. What if the above examples were instead something like the following? <identifier type="uri" type="primary" accessdate="20030205"> http://www.franulmer.com/</identifier> <identifier type="uri" type="archive"> http://wayback-cgi1.alexa.com/e2002/*/http://www.franulmer.com/</ identifier> > So if I cite a web page that has a copyright date of 2002, but I > access that page on May 3, 2003, then the date of the cited document > is 2002, but I am authenticating the URL only as of May 3, 2003. In a > sense, this latter date often substitutes for a date of publication > when the document itself gives no indication of a publication date, > but in fact it is information about the URL in my mind. The > publication would actually be "n.d." in library parlance -- "no date." It's not even that the access date substitutes. If I cite a New York Times article available online that was published in 2002, but I access it in 2003, both dates are included, and the second is simply to say "OK, urls are fragile, but I know for a fact this one was valid on this date." It often substitutes for missing publisher and place information, which is how one often identifies from where to obtain a resource. BTW, this brings up another issue I raised to Rebecca privately: shouldn't urls such as this be in the location element? They are, after all, references to where to find the resource. Bruce