Hi Mark, I confess this is starting to go over my head so please forgive me if I am woffling.
For entries manually submitted how would we get hold of a machine readable (mr) citation ? On the assumption that the user doesn't key it, would we ask them to enter the discrete bits and immediately form and store the mr citation ? Would this be in addition to them entering a formed citation string for the human readable version ? Or are we only going to support mr citations when they are entered by some other method eg a Sword deposit ? This begs the question, how would these incoming mr citations be formed ? Reference managers quite happily ask users to enter the discrete bits which they then store and form citations from on demand. I would argue that it's the instinctively obvious thing to do, the only reason we (Dspace) don't do it is because we are bound by our use of DC. I have a tendency to disappear up my own rear end when thinking about this stuff. It is a pertinent question you ask about the current use of OpenURL. I'm speaking from a position of ignorance. Cheers, Robin. Robin Taylor Main Library University of Edinburgh Tel. 0131 6513808 > -----Original Message----- > From: Mark H. Wood [mailto:mw...@iupui.edu] > Sent: 28 January 2010 14:53 > To: dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: Re: [Dspace-devel] RE. Machine readable citations > and metadata encodings > > Is a citation one datum or a package of many data? Depends > on how you are thinking about it at the moment. Is > "39°47'27"N 86°08'52W"" one datum, or two, or eight? > > (One of the complexities of learning to think in objects is > their essential duality. As with, "is light a wave or a > particle," an object's fundamental nature is usually less > significant than what it is that you would find most > convenient w.r.t. the question at hand.) > > We are going to have to deal with uses of citations as > packaged data and as individual data, so no matter which way > we jump, we are going to wind up transforming the data one > way or the other to serve the opposing need. > > It goes against the grain to combine different data into one > column, yes. But citations aren't a good candidate for > tabular representation anyway since, as pointed out, we want > to cite different kinds of publications. For N kinds we'd > need N+1 tables (one for each kind plus a discriminator) or a > single very sparse table with lots of nulls. (Imagine a > table that could cite journals, books, music albums, movies > by scene, law codes....) A generalized citation is more like > a union of structures than a single record type. It's a good > candidate for representation in syntax rather than discrete fields. > > Is there much experience with this use of OpenURL > representations? Is it working out well? > > Hmmm. As a single datum, an item either has a recommended > citation or it does not. As individual fields, an item could > have an incomplete citation. Is it important to be able to > represent incomplete citations? > > -- > Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mw...@iupui.edu > Friends don't let friends publish revisable-form documents. > -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
