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

Reply via email to