#493 value of biblScope@type in example in seriesStmt spec

[Kevin Hawkins]

The seriesStmt spec includes the following example:

<seriesStmt>
<title>Machine-Readable Texts for the Study of Indian Literature</title>
<respStmt>
<resp>ed. by</resp>
<name>Jan Gonda</name>
</respStmt>
<biblScope type="vol">1.2</biblScope>
<idno type="ISSN">0 345 6789</idno>
</seriesStmt>

Here, the value of biblScope@type is "vol", but it is used here not to mean "the element contains a volume number" (as in the spec for biblScope) but for a case of the element containing a volume and issue number together in abbreviated notation. I recall that there used to be some examples of this abbreviated notation in CO, but these have been broken out into two separate biblScopes (<biblScope type="vol"> and <biblScope type="issue">), especially within biblStructs, in an attempt to make the encoding more machine-readable. We could do the same here, or we could invent a new suggested value for biblScope@type to be used for such abbreviated notation. Such notation is, after all, common in source documents.

[Martin Holmes]

I vote for breaking it into two separate <biblScope>s. If your objective is to retain the formatting of an original reference, you'd use <bibl> rather than <biblScope>, surely?

[Kevin Hawkins]

If you used <biblStruct> instead of <bibl>, you would still have one more <biblScope>s as descendants. The question is whether a person using <bibl> and preserving original punctuation would do:

<biblScope type="vol">1</biblScope>.<biblScope type="issue">2</biblScope>

or whether we'll allow

<biblScope type="___">1.2</biblScope>

[Lou Burnard]

Didn't we decide to use @unit rather than @type? Or is the idea to use @type to show that this is a composite biblStruct and use @unit only if it's a unitary one?

[Kevin Hawkins]

We have indeed decided to use @unit instead of @type ( http://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/388/ ), and I have actually already changed @type to @unit in the element spec for biblScope. When I created this bug report, I was consulting the latest release and had forgotten about the change.

However, the point of this bug report was to question the value of the attribute and the use of one or two biblScope elements ... regardless of whether we use @type or @unit.

[Kevin Hawkins]

Council decided to leave it as is.