tjameswhite.com

Thoughts on what is needed for a citations microformat.

Brian’s citation pages look to be on target to me. We should certainly move forward with choosing a format to follow and go from there. (Brian - any thought of adding z39.80 to your formats table?)

As for a separate book review format, there really isn’t a need. Microformats are modular by nature (yes?) so you would simply use relevant bits of the citation format within hReview. Likewise, author names in the citation format could be marked up based on the hCard format. I’ve recently added hReview (using hCard for reviews’ names) to the reference reviews on our Web site (reviews.gale.com). I’d also like to mark up the products being reviewed and a citation format seems natural. On a personal note, I’d simply like a way to mark up book titles. There just isn’t a good way to do that at the moment.

Additionally, as I mentioned in my last email, we are rebuilding our online products core code at the moment to be semantically driven XHTML. We produce reference products for all libraries of all levels. So, when conducting a search on, say frogs, a number of articles (journal, newspaper, etc) citations are returned. We need to do a couple of things with these and having them semantically marked up would certainly help.

First, users can create bibliographic citations right from the results page or the article page. Citation formats include MLA, APA and Z39.80. Current output looks something like (with book titles set in italics):

[MLA style]
“Frog, Goliath.” Endangered Species. Eds. Sonia Benson and Rob Nagel. Vol. 3: Amphibians, Fish, Plants, and Reptiles. 2nd ed. Detroit: U*X*L, 2004. p533-535. 3 vols.

[z39.80]

AT Frog
CT Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary
CY 2005
DB Gale Virtual Reference Library
XX Service Name: Thomson Gale
XX Date of Access:31 October 2005
IL http://find.galegroup.com/gvrl/infomark.do ... [truncated by me]
AL General
BE Edgar, Kathleen
BN 0-7876-6667-X
CV Information and Publishing
DI CX3440403163
DP 2005
EB 0-7876-9383-9
ED 34th
LG English
ND 20041220
OT D-I
PB Gale
PL Detroit
RM COPYRIGHT Thomson Gale
VI CX3440403163
VO 2
XX Full Text
ZZ

It only makes sense to mark up the citations right from the beginning in a way that would allow output in either of these (or other) formats. Knowing each piece of the citation would make that pretty easy.

Secondly, from a purely presentation point of view, we need to present citations on screen in a standard manner. While most products present them in MLA format, some break the elements onto multiple lines.

“Frog, Goliath.” Endangered Species
Eds. Sonia Benson and Rob Nagel
Vol. 3: Amphibians, Fish, Plants, and Reptiles. 2nd ed. Detroit: U*X*L, 2004. p533-535. 3 vols.

Again, knowing each piece of the puzzle makes this pretty easy to do.