[microformats-discuss] Re: intro

Sun Aug 14 11:52:30 PDT 2005

On Aug 14, 2005, at 9:00 AM, Brian Suda wrote:
> I would agree that a Bibliographic Microformat WOULD be helpful. When
> citing publications that are ONLY in print there is no URL to
> references. Plus, there is extra data that is not always represented
> in a URL, such as Page Number, Issue, etc. A good place to start with
> this sort of data would be to model it after BibTeX references, they
> have been around for a long time and are pretty solid.

I've been lurking for a few weeks since I wanted to see if the COiNS 
[1] might have some potential as a microformat. COiNS is a relatively 
recent ad-hoc library community standard for embedding OpenURL [2] 
references in HTML. OpenURL itself is a NISO standard for bundling 
metadata for bibliographic references in a URL which was largely 
developed by library technology companies to facilitate linkages 
between indexes/catalogs and content providers.
As services like Google Scholar have shown, it would be really nice 
to have bibliographic information encoded in HTML so third party add 
ons (like Wag the Dog [3]) could scrape the HTML and route 
appropriately to local content management systems. Here's an example:
<span class="Z3988" 
title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&amp;rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/ 
fmt:kev:mtx:journal&amp;rft.issn=1045-4438"></span>
I imagine that since there is very little in the way of meaningful 
html markup in COinS it may not have much potential as a microformat. 
It's a sad state of affairs that library standards tend not to make 
it out into the wild, mainly because of too much navel gazing...so 
there is some hope that we could leverage COinS as microformat to 
gain some exposure and usage outside of the cloistered walls of 
academic libraries.
If there is any interest at all I am volunteering to put together 
some documentation and examples for review by y'all. Some more 
practical information about COinS can be found here [4,5,6].
//Ed
[1] http://ocoins.info/
[2] http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_ax.html
[3] http://gslocal.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://curtis.med.yale.edu/dchud/log/project/groupware/ 
introducing-coins
[5] http://ocoins.info/cobg.html
[6] http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001163.html