[uf-discuss] citation microformat?

[Ed Summers]

On 1/17/06, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Who knew you could make a citation so complicated?

Library professionals--who are partly responsible :-) Wouldn't it be
nice if there were an analog in the print world to the <a href="...">
in the web world? Don't citations in the print world really act just
like links?

But wait...this is what openurl is and does for many libraries--and it
is (arguably) the iCalendar of print citations. OpenURL itself is a
pretty hairy standard, but it provides a simple list of keys that
could easily be used in a microformat. Here are the ones for books
[1].

> Nonetheless, they should provide good material for harvesting for a simple
> 80/20 cite microformat based on actual examples published on the Web.

There are actually some decent examples already [2]. Perhaps these
were just added? Assuming that these examples are good would it be
acceptable to go about marking up each example with microformatted
versions of openurl, docbook and bibtex and see how that works? I'm a
bit confused about next steps.

//Ed

[1] http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/servlet/OAIHandler/extension?verb=GetMetadata&metadataPrefix=mtx&identifier=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book
[2] http://www.microformats.com/wiki/cite-examples