Proposal to clarify and rationalize encoding of pagination in bibliographic citations

Kevin HawkinsMartin HolmesLaurent Romary2012

Based on email correspondence among the authors as part of their work on the Ad-hoc committee on encoding of bibliographic citations of the TEI Technical Council.

Minor cleanup.First draft.

Statement of problem

P5 is currently unclear on how to encode page ranges in bibliographic citations. While extent and biblScope are both used in P5 for pagination, it’s not clear when to choose which.

Furthermore, section 3.11.2.3 prescribes use of biblScope within imprint in the case of a journal article—a practice which has become widespread in our community but lacks a solid bibliographic foundation (since the cited pages do not relate to publication or distribution of a bibliographic item). We assume this was inserted into the Guidelines so that you could use biblStruct to encode a typical citation to a journal article and still keep all of the components of the citation in the same order as in common citation formats, but we think this use confuses the matter greatly.

Goal

We would like to allow those encoding structured citations to:

  • be explicit about whether a page range is for an entire bibliographic item or for just a cited portion
  • have the page ranges be encoded in a sensible place in the citation’s element hierarchy—that is, they should be related to their parent element
Proposal

To meet these goals, we would revise the Guidelines prose and element specifications as follows:

  • We would prescribe use of extent for a page range for an entire bibliographic item (journal article, chapter, etc.), and prescribe use of biblScope type=”pp” for just those pages that are cited.
  • Since biblScope type=”pp” is currently widely used for the range of an entire bibliographic item instead of extent, we would deprecate this use of biblScope type=”pp”.
  • We would remove the guidance in section 3.11.2.3 to put biblScope inside imprint for journal articles since we think it doesn’t make sense. We would deprecate use of biblScope inside of imprint and plan to remove it in P6.
  • In biblStruct citations, we would recommend that extent and biblScope only be used as children of the analytic, monogr, or series for the bibliographic item to which they relate. This would require the following schema modifications:

    • Add extent to analytic.
    • Add extent to series.
    • Add biblScope to analytic.
  • Since extent has till now been used to give a total number of pages, volumes, etc. instead of page ranges, we would add attributes to this element to make it similar to biblScope:

    • Add from and to to extent. Since the attributes would function the same on both elements, a new class would be created, att.biblRange, containing these two attributes. Both extent and biblScope would become members of this attribute class.
    • Add extent to att.typed and recommend the use of type with the same suggested values as for biblScope.
Implications

This would affect bibl, biblStruct, and biblFull differently.

bibl

For bibls without nested bibls, this is quite straightforward. Just use extent or biblScope type=”pp” as appropriate.

If you nest bibls, insert extent and biblStruct in the bibl of the bibliographic item to which it relates.

biblStruct

Since we would like page ranges to be children of a logical parent element, here are the possible locations of the elements and their intended meanings (when including a page range) under the proposal:

XPath explanation sample usage (element content varies by citation style)
analytic/extent[@type='pp'] page range of a whole journal article, book chapter, etc. pp. 37–52
analytic/biblScope[@type='pp'] page or page range cited from a journal article, book chapter, etc. 3434–35
monogr/extent[@type='pp'] total number of pages in a book 342 p.
monogr/biblScope[@type='pp'] page or page range cited from a book 3434–35
monogr/imprint/extent never has and still will not be allowed
monogr/imprint/biblScope[@type='pp'] no longer recommended in any circumstances
series/extent[@type='pp'] Unlikely to be used for a total number of pages in a series (but is more likely to be used for the number of volumes in a series, e.g., 3 vols.).
series/biblScope[@type='pp'] Though allowed in P5, it never has been recommended by P5 and would still not be recommended. (Note that series/biblScope would still be recommended for citing a particular volume number of a series, as it is now in P5.)
biblFull

biblFull already allows extent as a child, so this can be used for the total number of pages for the bibliographic item.

biblFull, like fileDesc, is derived from the International Standard for Bibliographic Description, which, being designed as the basis for library catalogs, has rarely been concerned with cited page ranges. Though there is a way to do this in ISBD, there is no element in TEI that corresponds to this component of the ISBD in the way there are for other components of the ISBD. While TEI users creating a teiHeader would probably chose to include a cited page range either within sourceDesc or possibly in samplingDecl, we are content not to try to solve the problem of how to include a cited page range in either biblFull or fileDesc.