Dublin Core™ Metadata Initiative - Bibliographic Citation Working Group Working Draft

Title:

Bibliographic Citation Working Draft

Creator:
Date Issued:
1999-07-02
Identifier:
Replaces:
Not applicable
Is Replaced By:
Not applicable
Latest Version:
Status of Document:
This is a DCMI Working Draft.
Description of Document: We agreed to focus on the metadata of the bibliographic record of the resource, not the metadata of citations (references) to the resource.

I understand from the Guidelines for Dublin Core™ Working Groups (draft 1.4) that once a Chair has established consensus within the WG, the Group's recommendations should be circulated to the dc-general list for comment. Below, you will find our Recommendations. (Please refer to http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-citation.html if you would like to see who is in the Working Group and the discussions behind the recommendations.) Comments should be posted to dc-general by Monday 19 July.

i) SCOPE OF THE WORKING GROUP

We agreed to focus on the metadata of the bibliographic record of the resource, not the metadata of citations (references) to the resource.

ii) MATTERS TO BE ADDRESSED

We agreed that we should limit ourselves to two specific questions raised in the meta2 discussion lists last year, namely a) how to indicate journal article metadata in a bibliographic record, covering the article's location within a journal title, volume, issue and pages, and b) how to indicate edition/version/release information in a resource's bibliographic record.

iii) RECOMMENDATIONS FOR JOURNAL ARTICLE INFORMATION

We recommend that the most appropriate place for this information is DC.Relation.

We also considered Title, Description, Identifier and Source, but these were rejected in favour of Relation. DC.Title should contain the article title but no other locational information. DC.Identifier should contain one or more identifiers for the article itself (e.g. the article SICI, PII, DOI, URL, etc.) but should not contain identifiers to the issue, volume or journal.

The major discussion centred around whether the most appropriate DC tag was Relation or Source. Some arguments were put forward that, for the electronic version of an article, DC.Source could be used to identify the print "original" (i.e. with Journal, Volume, Issue and Pages), and this is a common implementation practice, but we rejected this argument on the basis that you couldn't say which version was derived from which other version. The electronic version *may* be derived from the print (e.g. by a process of back-conversion from typeset files to HTML) or the print may derive from the electronic: how do you know what processes have taken place? The print may be released before the electronic, or vice versa, or they may be released simultaneously. And what if there is only the one version - only print or only electronic?

Some implementers made a distinction between using Source when the electronic was derived from print and Relation when the resource only ever appeared in an electronic version. However, we regarded this distinction as essentially arbitrary and reliant upon information that wouldn't always be available, so we recommend that Relation is used, whether the material is published first in print or not.

The Working Group was not constrained into considering DC Simple (DC 1.0) solutions only, which would be very restrictive as far as specifying Relations go. On the other hand, DC Qualified is of course not yet stable, so any recommendations we make that use qualifiers are subject to future stabilisation.

We recommend using the "IsPartOf" construct. The full location information should be given as both a text string and one or more identifiers *to the resource that the article is a part of*. The text string should include the page range (or equivalent locational information in a non-page-based resource) - even though it could be argued that logically the article is not a *part* of a page range (it *spans* a page range rather than is subsumed within it), we recommend this practice because a) the page range appears naturally at the end of journal bibliographic information, b) we suspect implementers will put it there anyway, and c) they'll do this because there's nowhere else for it to go.

For example, let's say we have an article in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Volume 47, Issue 1, starting on Page 37. The SICI for this article is 1097-4571(199601)47:1<37::AID-ASI4>3.0.CO;2-3. The DOI is the SICI preceded by 10.1002/(SICI). The URL is the DOI preceded by http://doi.wileynpt.com/.

In the DC record for the article, we would have the above SICI, DOI and URL all entered under DC.Identifier (with the appropriate Schemes indicated in DC Qualified).

The text string for DC.Relation "IsPartOf" would be "Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 37". (The complete page range could also be included.) DC Qualified might break this down into subelements. (We would recommend explicit subelements such as JournalTitle, JournalVolume, JournalIssue, and JournalPages.)

The identifiers within DC.Relation "IsPartOf" could be (again with appropriate Scheme designations): "1097-4571(199601)47:1<>1.0.CO;2-T" (for the SICI of the Issue that the article is a part of);
"10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199601)47:1<>1.0.CO;2-T (for the DOI of the Issue that the article is part of); and http://doi.wileynpt.com/10.1002 [and so on]" for the URL of the Issue that the article is part of.

iv) RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDITION/VERSION/RELEASE

We recommend that this information should go into DC.Title.

Other options that we considered were Description, Identifier, and Relation "IsVersionOf".

Recommended subelement would be DC.Title.Release, whether we were referring to editions, versions or releases, since this was felt to be the most generic term.

DC.Identifier should contain the relevant identifier of the release itself, e.g. the ISBN of a 2nd edition of a title, but would not indicate release enumeration (e.g. it would not say "2nd edition" or "edition 2" or "2" in the Identifier field - this goes into Title).

DC.Relation "IsVersionOf" can be used to refer back to previous versions but not to indicate the edition/version of the current resource.

v) CONCLUSIONS

a) We limited our scope to bibliographic records.

b) We concentrated on two issues that had been specifically raised in
previous discussion groups, and for which no conclusions had been reached.

c) We recommend the use of DC.Relation "IsPartOf" for journal article placement information, i.e. for indicating which journal, volume, issue and pages an article belongs to. This tag should be used whether the article started life as a print product or as an electronic one. The Relation can also refer to various Identifiers of the journal issue of which the article is part.

d) Edition/version/release information ought to be part of DC.Title. As a subelement, we recommend DC.Title.Release (which recommendation has already been passed on to the Title Working Group).

If there are no further comments by 19 July, I will pass the recommendations on to TAC (or, more correctly, the recently constituted DC-AC).

Thanks

Cliff Morgan
Publishing Technologies Director
John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Chichester, UK