28 March 2002
This version: <http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/DC/citdcsv-20020328.html>
Previous version: This is the first version for
review
Latest version: <http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/DC/citdcsv.html>
Author: Ann Apps <ann.apps@man.ac.uk>
MIMAS, University of Manchester, UK
Status of this document: Under Review
Description: This document contains a proposal by the DCMI Citation Working Group [1] to the Dublin Core Usage Board for a method of encoding a Dublin Core compliant set of metadata properties for recording bibliographic citation information about journal articles within a string value. This proposed new encoding scheme, which employs a Dublin Core Structured Value, would become an alternative encoding scheme for dc:identifier and the proposed new element refinement dcterms:citation [2].
| Elements | dc:identifier and dcterms:citation [2] |
| Qualifier | New encoding scheme: DCMI Cite, a DCSV as defined in section 3.2 |
| Source of Proposal | DCMI Citation Working Group [1] |
| Justification | See sections 2 and 5 |
| Overlap with other terms | None |
| Impact and Interoperability | There will be existing DC applications which have used differing methods for solving this problem, but there is no existing best practice |
| Best practice recommendations | See section 3.3 |
| Examples | See section 4 |
This document describes a proposal to the Dublin Core Usage Board for a recommendation to:
The purpose of these bibliographic citation properties is primarily to support resource discovery. They would assist with discovering the location of a resource and thus could support citation linking. In addition they could be used for resource description to support capture of the complete bibliographic record for a journal article.
One objective of this proposal is to provide a mechanism for encoding journal article bibliographic citation information within a single text string. This encoding method will be suitable for capturing this information within a meta tag in the head section of an HTML or xhtml document.
This proposal is a companion to the proposal for "A citation Element Refinement for dc:identifier" [2], but neither proposal depends on the other.
It should be noted that the bibliographic information described here is the complete bibliographic record for the resource itself. This proposal is not concerned with capturing citation linking data for a related resource.
The properties generally used to capture the bibliographic citation of a journal article may be identified at three distinct levels: the Journal level; the journal Issue level (which may also include a journal Volume level); and the individual Article level. The following table indicates these properties according to this hierarchical level, and where appropriate which Dublin Core element is already available to record the information.
| Level | Property | DC Element |
|---|---|---|
| Journal | Journal Title | |
| Journal Abbreviated Title | ||
| Journal Identifier | ||
| Issue | Volume | |
| Number | ||
| Chronology | ||
| Article | Article Title | dc:title |
| Author | dc:creator | |
| Publisher | dc:publisher | |
| Publication Year | dc:date | |
| Publication Date | dc:date | |
| Identifier | dc:identifier | |
| Pagination |
It is apparent from this table that there is currently no method within Dublin Core to capture the bibliographic citation of a journal article, except by recording the information in an ad hoc way within a dc:description element, or by capturing the metadata in a hierarchical manner.
The proposed recommended method for capturing bibliographic citation information about journal articles in Dublin Core is as follows:
The proposed recommendation requires a new encoding scheme, DCMI Cite which follows the recommended Dublin Core Structured Value (DCSV) [3] syntax for encoding a list of labelled values within a text string:
The DCSV syntax, to be used for DCMI Cite defines a list of 'label=value' pairs embedded within a text string. This syntax is a DCMI recommendation.
In the spirit of Dublin Core all the introduced properties are optional and repeatable with no prescribed order. However, common sense indicates that a bibliographic citation must contain sufficient information to identify a resource, and that the citation should not include conflicting details. This is generally understood to be a minimum of journal identification, journal volume and article start page, although this may vary depending on the organisation of the journal, eg. some journal issues always number from page one making the issue number significant. In order to satisfy the `dumb-down' principle it is recommended that a `DCMI Cite' contain sufficient details to identify the resource. Taking these considerations into account, it is recommended that:
This is an example of a Dublin Core record for a journal article including its bibliographic citation information. This example is independent of any syntax recommendation apart from the DCMI Cite DCSV. Any other syntax and any line breaks used in this example are for clarification purposes only.
dc:title = Studying E-journal User Behavior Using Log Files
dc:creator = Lu, Y
dc:creator = Apps, A
dc:subject(scheme=DDC) = 020
dc:description = Statistical methods for analysing e-journal user behaviour.
dc:publisher = Pergamon
dcterms:issued(scheme=W3CDTF) = 2000
dc:type(scheme=DCMIType) = text
dcterms:medium(scheme=IMT) = application/pdf
dc:identifier(scheme=URI) = doi:10.1060/xyz.abc
dc:identifier(scheme=URI) = urn:sici:07408188(200010)22:3<311:SEUB>2.0.CO;2-X
dcterms:citation(scheme=DCMICite) =
journalTitle=Library and Information Science Research;
journalAbbreviatedTitle=LISR;
journalVolume=22;
journalIssueNumber=3;
journalIssueDate=October 2000;
pagination=311-338;
dc:language(scheme=RFC1766) = en
dcterms:isPartOf(scheme=URI) = urn:issn:0740-8188
dc:rights = © Elsevier, 2000
This is an example of two properties within an xhtml metadata record for the same journal article which define its bibliographic citation. The first property, dcterms:citation, uses the DCMI Cite DCSV encoding scheme. [Note that line breaks are for clarification only.]
<meta name="dcterms:citation" scheme="DCMICite"
content="journalTitle=Library and Information Science Research;
journalAbbreviatedTitle=LISR;
journalVolume=22;
journalIssueNumber=3;
journalIssueDate=2000;
pagination=311-338;" />
<meta name="dcterms:isPartOf" scheme="URI"
content="urn:issn:0740-8188" />
The advantages of the dc:description solution would be to retain the essential simplicity of Dublin Core, and that the information would be presented to someone discovering the metadata in a human-readable way. The latter point is important, and any solution should provide data to a human end-user in a readily understandable form - they may wish to find the article on a library shelf. The disadvantage of using dc:description is that it becomes difficult to perform further machine processing on the discovered metadata, which may be required for discovery of the location of the article.
It would be possible to partially record the information in a hierarchical way, using a dc:relation element to point from an article record to a record for its containing issue, and similarly from the issue record to that for the containing journal. There are two drawbacks to this solution:
It could be thought that including information about a journal in the metadata for an article breaks the `one-to-one' rule. However the objective here is not to provide information about the journal, but rather to provide a bibliographic citation of an article, which effectively identifies it.
Another possible method for including in a metadata record information which doesn't fit obviously into one of the 15 elements of the Dublin Core element set (DCMES), or the ratified qualifiers, is to introduce application specific elements and qualifiers within an application profile[4]. Thus an option would be to define a `citation' profile and include new elements such as `journal title' within it. However, capturing bibliographic citation information seems to be a generic, cross-domain problem. The bibliographic citation of a journal article is fairly fundamental information, required within many subject areas, at least for academia and researchers. It is information which is becoming increasingly significant with the implementation of linking technologies. Therefore it would seem sensible to have a best practice convention for capturing journal article citation information within Dublin Core metadata using existing elements, rather than a proliferation of application profiles attempting to solve the same problem in different ways with new application specific elements. However, the bibliographic citation propoerties identified within this proposal, and suggested for encoding within a DCMI Cite DCSV would form the basis of a Citation Profile suitable for encoding in XML or RDF.
The emerging OpenURL [5] standard may provide an alternative encoding scheme for capturing journal article bibliographic citation information within a single string. However, there are currently reasons for not recommending OpenURL as a citation encoding scheme:
How to record a bibliographic record for a journal article has previously been discussed by an earlier Dublin Core Citation Working Group, whose recommendation made after the DC7 Workshop was 'Citation Qualifier Proposal - 2000' [6], which also includes details of a vote by the general DC community at the plenary session at DC8 Workshop.
[1] DCMI Citation Working
Group. http://www.dublincore.org/groups/citation
[2] A citation Element
Refinement for dc:identifier http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/DC/citproposal.html
[3] Cox, S. and Ianella, R.
(2000) DCMI DCSV: A syntax for writing a list of labelled in a
text string. http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-dcsv/
[4] Heery, R. and Patel, M.
(2000) Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata
schemas. Ariadne 25, September 2000. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles
[5]NISO Committee AX: Development
of an OpenURL Standard. http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/
[6] Citation Qualifier Proposal -
2000.
http://www.dublincore.org/groups/citation/citqualifier2000.html