[uf-discuss] Easy book citations

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 7/30/06, Fred Stutzman <fred at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
>
> > The examples I am referring to -- and which start to show difficulty
> > -- are thiings like parts (chapters) within books. If you encode the
> > title for the book as <span class="publication title">Book
> > Title</span> (or use "container" instead of "publication"), then
> > great!
>
> Bib natively supports inbook citations.  I'm not sure I see what the
> problem is?

The problem is the totally flat data model, and fields like
"booktitle" and "journal." These are basically hacks to suggest
implicitly the relation in question. They work within their narrow
realms, but they break when you deal with even subtly different
relations and reference types: newspaper articles, legal cases
(published in court reporters, which are just a kind of
periodical/publication), etc., etc.

The thing you have to recognize in designing a good, extensible,
format is that biblioigraphic data is fundmentally relational. It
makes sense to hide that complexity where you can, but there are some
places where I think it's really bad pratice to do so. Title is an
example.

Bruce