Storage locations again

[ I've cc'ed and reply-to'ed the refdb devel list. A few others might
be interested too ]

Daniel O'Donnell writes:
 > Hi Markus,
 > 
 > I'm thinking about how to handle the AV field, and especially what to do
 > about digital and physical locations for the same copy. Related to this
 > is call numbers.
 > 
 > Currently, in your implementation of RIS an object can't have both a
 > physical and a virtual AV, right? Do you think I should require users to
 > specify which they mean? I.e. check a box to say "computer file" vs.
 > "physical copy"? Or we could move one of the fields off to a U or M.
 > 

As usual, the RIS spec is not very clear about this, but I wonder
whether we should use the L1/L2 fields for storing paths to electronic
copies. Each dataset can have an unlimited number of L1 and L2 entries
so this would not collide with an URL to the original location of a
PDF. The only difference would be a local path, something like
file:///path/to/file.pdf, instead of an URL. We'd have to figure out
something to keep the pdfroot mechanism alive though. refdbc, or a web
frontend would then have to check both the AV and the L1/L2 fields for
matching entries if the RP field claims the item is in file.

 > Same thing with Call numbers, which are covered anywhere in RIS.
 > Refworks actually uses ER  - to store them!?! We discussed this earlier
 > and for my personal use I was just going to choose one of the U or M
 > fields, but a PHP form is going to enforce the choice on whoever uses
 > it. Any suggestions for where that ought to go?
 > 

If at all, we should settle on one of the U fields. Frankly, I don't
have a better suggestion right now if we want to be able to export all
data to RIS. We'll have to decide whether this is indeed an important
goal, or if we should move ahead and officially support more data than
RIS can store.

 > Given your own work on a better storage and transport language, I think
 > we should be looking for solutions to these that are easily undone so
 > data entered into RIS using this form can be converted easily to
 > whatever comes next. I wouldn't mind being on the same page with you on
 > this.
 > 

I have no idea what your data entry code looks like right now. I
assume you have some internal representation of the data that you
receive as input, and you map that representation to either RIS or
risx. I guess that only that mapping is going to change if RefDB moves
to a richer storage model.

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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