On Monday 21 November 2005 3:05 am, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:

I am still considering the other points but I can make a comment on this.

> 3)  Primary and secondary sources.  This is a tricky one, as David has
> made the argument one would need to assign groups in this case.  I am
> assuming the formatter can have some generic logic to handle this.
> E.g., primary sources do not have publishers, and are not articles?

There is really no way to automaticly separate the primary and secondary 
sources. This is because the categories Primary and secondary are in relation 
to the topic. In my History thesis on Early Irish Sagas, the early saga texts 
were the Primary source to the topic. (Note: these were published texts.) 
Other peoples commentary on the work were secondary. But if the topic was 
'The History of Commentary on the  Early Irish Sagas' then much of what was 
secondary source material in the first paper becomes the primary material for 
the second paper. Thus topic dependent.

For my thesis, if I had been able to read Old Irish and had consulted the 
original unpublished manuscripts then these would have been the primary 
sources, not the published translations I did rely on.

I have now just realised that this means that not only do users need to be 
able to specify the groupings for the bibliography  (primary and secondary, 
and any others) but that user needs to be able to specify which group the 
citation belongs to for each paper!

Sorry Bruce this seems to make a bit more difficult.

David


-- 
-------------------
David N. Wilson
Co-Project Lead for the Bibliographic 
OpenOffice Project
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org

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