Bibliographies for scholarly work: Using for scientific bibliographies


Bibliographies for scholarly work: Using <gi>biblStruct</gi> for scientific bibliographies

To be made public through the TEI web site once the proposal is endorsed by the TEI Council

Born digital

Scope

The first objective of this SIG is to study and to document the usability of the existing TEI biblStruct element for the representation of bibliographies, whether these are organized as academic reference lists citing published material, or, in the case of humanities scholarship, references to primary sources. Secondly, the SIG aims to identify a set of core encoding guidelines to be used by scholars both in preparing such bibliographies and for use in the relevant sections of the TEI header (e.g. sourceDesc) of their TEI encoded sources. Thirdly, the SIG will develop mappings to and from other bibliographic formats widely used in the research community such as MODS, Refer, Bibtex… The SIG will not address the issue of citation styles and other presentational aspects.

Context

The P5 edition of the TEI guidelines, after a lengthy debate on whether there was need for another element (biblItem) for bibliographic descriptions, has extended the expressive power of biblStruct most noticeably with the relatedItem element, inspired from MODS. It has also defined a number of element model classes. In its current state biblStruct seem to offer the richest method of describing scientific works: independent works, relation to issues and series, multiple editions etc.

Program of work

The activity of the SIG will essentially be example based. This both complements the TEI guidelines, and is of direct benefit to users with basic needs and questions concerning the use of biblStruct.

Gathering samples

The group will gather a collection of reference samples representing typical cases in encoding scientific works or primary/historical sources. These exempla will be manually encoded and documented onlineCf. prior similar activitues carried out in German under http://colab.mpdl.mpg.de/mediawiki/TEI_Bibliographic_Information.

Some of the important issues are the encoding of names (authors and/or organisations, especially the separate encoding of for- and surnames, pseudonyms etc.), the encoding of references to standardized name files like the LoC Name Authority File or PND PND = Personennamendatei (name authority file) is the german reference file for personal names., the values for biblScope/@type (cf. biblScope type=”pp” vs. biblScope type=”pages”) and the encoding of ‘divided’ publications (eg. an journal-article which is printed on p. 1–7, 20–26 and refers to figure 1–5 at the end of the containing journal). Also, there could be a standardization of bibliographical references and citations in texts (maybe by embedding CiteSchemaCf. http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/cite/ for a description of citeSchema. as a namespace).

Documenting formats – mappings

Sample exempla will also systematically be represented in other formats widely used in scientific works (BibTex, MODS, Endnote/refer); this in turn should lead to a systematic documentation of the possible mappings between these.

Converters

Converters between biblStruct elements and other commonly used formats will be developed using XSLT stylesheets.

Converters to citation-styles of academic journals etc. may be realized by a XSLT stylesheet transforming biblStruct and using the Citation Style Language (CSL).Cf. http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/csl/.See also RefDB, http://refdb.sourceforge.net, for SGML, XML, bibtex, and RTF

Related work

The SIG members will monitor and (where appropriate) participate in other related initiatives, in particular to see whether mappings can benefit from work done elsewhere (e.g. “bibutils”, http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/) or to contribute to enhance the facilities provided by collaborative tools such as Zotero (www.zotero.org; e.g. by writing a converter to COinS).

New features – evolution of the TEI guidelines

It is expected that the activities planned in this SIG will lead to a thorough assessment of the biblStruct element as it stands in the current version of the guidelines, and will probably lead to some feature requests to the TEI Council. Specific topics already identified relate to the proper representation of affiliations (orgorgName), typology of publication objects (biblStruct/@type), accurate representation of publishing instances (publisherpubPlace) and constraints on embedded works (“scoping” relatedItem, good practices on embedding bibliographic items).

Some other new features to be discussed will be the possibility to use textClass as a child of monogr, analytic or series, in order to encode keywords for publications, the encoding of copy-specific identifiers like shelfmarks or repositories (following the structure of msIdentifier perhaps as exIdentifier or copyIdentifier), the use of biblScope as a direct child of monogr and series (it’s use in imprint seems somewhat improper) and the possibility to use extent in biblStruct and the distinction of several types of extents (eg. pages, sentences and words), either via an @type-Atribute (which is currently not allowed for extent oder by using different types of measure in the extent-Tag.

Potential participants ChristianeFritze<orgname>Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences</orgname>BerlinOliverDuntze<orgname>Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences</orgname>BerlinAndreas Nolda<orgname>Humboldt University</orgname>BerlinLaurent Romary,<orgname>INRIA-Gemo</orgname>BerlinGodfried Croener<orgname>University of Liverpool</orgname>Michel Dalmau<orgname>Indiana University Digital Library Program</orgname>Martin Holmes<orgname>Univ. of Victoria</orgname>Patrice Lopez<orgname>European Patent Office</orgname>, BerlinMelanie Schlosser<orgname>Ohio State University</orgname>Werner Wegstein<orgname>Univ. of Würzburg</orgname>Grace Wiersma<orgname>MIT Libraries</orgname>, BostonKevin Hawkins<orgname>Univ. of Michigan</orgname>Hans-Günter Schmidt<orgname>Univ. of Würzburg</orgname>Wendell Piez<orgname>Mulberry Tech.</orgname>Melissa Terras<orgname>University College London</orgname>Julia Flanders<orgname>Brown University</orgname>