DTD for Bibliographic Notation

[Jerome McDonough]

At 08:26 AM 3/3/1999 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>Has anybody written a DTD for bibliographies?  Are there any standards
>efforts in this area?  To be usable, this DTD would have to be public
>domain or explicitly allow unrestricted reuse. I probably don't need to
>modify it, but at a minimum I need to be able to republish it.
>

Mm, not to be Clinton-esque or anything, but it depends on what you
mean by bibliographies.  There are an awful lot of DTDs that include 
elements for bibliographic citation as part of a larger document
structure.  Some of the better known examples would include 
the <biblStruct> and <biblFull> elements with the TEI DTD, the <citation> 
element within ETD-ML DTD (part of the Electronic Thesis and 
Dissertation project at Virginia Tech), the <bibliography> element with
the Encoded Archival Description DTD, and the <BiblioEntry> element in
DocBook.

There are standalone DTDs for capturing bibliographic information, but
they tend to be written by library geeks like me, and as a result, tend
to be a bit more detailed and extensive (read arcane and opaque) than 
what most people would think of when designing a DTD for bibliographies.  
The most authoritative work in these lines would probably be the 
MARC DTDs provided by the Library of Congress
(http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marcsgml.html), but understanding
those without copies of both the USMARC standard and the Anglo-American
Cataloguing Rules next to you is a non-trivial task.  If you want to
look over a simpler version of the MARC standard as an XML DTD, I
revised an SGML DTD that I did for MARC which you can grab at 
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~jmcdonou/USMARC.XML.DTD; again, knowledge
of the MARC standard is a big help on making heads or tails of the DTD, but
<Fld100>, <Fld245>, <Fld260>, and <Fld300> comprise most of what people
think of as basic bibliographic information.

If you're thinking that having all these different ways of encoding
bibliographic information is a headache waiting for those wanting to 
automate processing of bibliographic data from multiple sources, you're right.
But I don't think there's any way out of that one.  The needs of those doing
markup of bibliographic information vary quite a bit depending on whether
we're
talking scholars reporting on their research, librarians, publishers, students
at various levels, etc.  Mapping between multiple forms of marked up
bibliographic data is something we're just going to have to live with.
I try to think of it as yet another clause in the text-encoding programmers'
full employment act.


Jerome McDonough -- jmcdonou at library.Berkeley.EDU  |  (......)
Library Systems Office, 386 Doe, U.C. Berkeley     |  \ *  * /
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000    (510) 642-5168          |  \  <>  /
"Well, it looks easy enough...."                   |   \ -- /  SGNORMPF!!!
         -- From the Famous Last Words file        |    ||||

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