Hi everybody,

being one of the persons who are responsible for the original 
<biblItem> proposal, I'd like to comment on some of the previous 
statements in this thread.

Martin Holmes wrote:
> Having looked at the examples cited for biblItem in the P5 docs, it
> does look like it's providing the same level of structure and
> organization as biblStruct; I also like the approach of nesting one
> within another to handle an article (analytic) hosted by a larger
> object (journal), using role="host". It's a little ironic that the
> resulting structure represents the journal's biblItem as nested
> inside the articles's biblItem, whereas the reality it's trying to
> represent is actually the reverse, but it would do as well as
> biblStruct for my projects.

<biblItem> provides a flexible way to encode bibliographic items 
(book, journals, articles, etc.) and the, possibly recursive, 
relations between them (being-the-host-of, being-the-original-of, 
being-reviewed-by, etc.).
 
Bibliographic items are referred to by <biblItem> occurrences. 
Relations between bibliographic items are represented in one of two 
ways:

1. Related <biblItem>s are included in the <biblItem> they are related
   to. The relation is encoded in the @role attribute of the included
   <biblItem>s. Consider the following example:

   <biblItem>
     <author>Robins, Robert H.</author>
     <title level="a">The development of the word class system of the
       European grammatical tradition</title>
     <biblItem role="host">
       <title level="m">Wortarten</title>
       <title level="m" type="subordinate">Beiträge zur Geschichte
         eines grammatischen Problems</title>
       <editor>Schaeder, Burkhard</editor>
       <editor>Knobloch, Clemens</editor>
       <pubPlace>Tübingen</pubPlace>
       <publisher>Niemeyer</publisher>
       <date>1992</date>
       <biblScope type="pages">315-332</biblScope>
     </biblItem>
     <biblItem role="original">
       <title level="j">Foundations of Language</title>
       <date>1966</date>
       <biblScope type="volume">2</biblScope>
       <biblScope type="pages">3-19</biblScope>
     </biblItem>
   </biblItem>

   Note that the choice of the Robins <biblItem> as the outermost
   <biblItem> -- instead of the collection <biblItem> or the journal
   <biblItem> -- is a question of *reference*. While each <biblItem>
   occurrence refers to one bibliographic item, it is the outermost
   <biblItem> that determines the reference of the *whole*. So, if the
   example above would be part of the bibliography of a book, an
   author-date type reference to it in the body of the book would
   render as "Robins 1992" (instead of, say, "Schaeder and Knobloch
   1992"; in order to make the whole <biblItem> refer to the
   collection or to the journal you would have to encode it the other
   way round).

2. Some or all of the related bibliographic items are referred to by
   independent <biblItem>s and the relations between them are encoded
   by <biblItem>s with a @target attribute:

   <biblItem>
     <author>Robins, Robert H.</author>
     <title level="a">The development of the word class system of the
       European grammatical tradition</title>
     <biblItem role="host" target="#schaederKnobloch1992">
       <biblScope type="pages">315-332</biblScope>
     </biblItem>
     <biblItem role="original">
       <title level="j">Foundations of Language</title>
       <date>1966</date>
       <biblScope type="volume">2</biblScope>
       <biblScope type="pages">3-19</biblScope>
     </biblItem>
   </biblItem>
   
   <biblItem id="schaederKnobloch1992">
     <title level="m">Wortarten</title>
     <title level="m" type="subordinate">Beiträge zur Geschichte eines
       grammatischen Problems</title>
     <editor>Schaeder, Burkhard</editor>
     <editor>Knobloch, Clemens</editor>
     <pubPlace>Tübingen</pubPlace>
     <publisher>Niemeyer</publisher>
     <date>1992</date>
   </biblItem>

   As an alternative to the
   <biblItem role="host" target="schaederKnobloch1992"> pointer, an
   <(x)ref type="biblItemHost" target="#schaederKnobloch1992"> pointer
   could be used, provided that the latter allows for <biblScope>
   children. Relations like 'being-reviewed-by' where <biblScope> is
   not appropriate could either be encoded by a
   <biblItem role="workReviewed" target="#..."/> or by an
   <(x)ptr type="biblItemWorkReviewed" target="#..."/>.

While approach (1) is most appropriate for directly encoding the
bibliography of a book, approach (2) may be more appropriate for 
storing information on bibliographic items in a modular
'bibliographic database'.

Syd Bauman wrote:
> <biblItem>, on
> the other hand, replicates much of what <bibl> does, and so there
> is some talk of giving <bibl> the form=, role=, type=, and status=
> attributes, and dropping <biblItem>. (Besides the attributes, the
> only other difference between <bibl> and <biblItem> is that former
> permits text and phrase-level elements in its content, whereas the
> latter has content that is restricted to bibliographic elements.)

I would advise against such a move. Citing from the <bibl> reference:

    <bibl> contains a loosely-structured bibliographic citation of
    which the sub-components may or may not be explicitly tagged.

<biblItem>, however, is inherently structured, does not allow for 
mixed content, and has a well-defined semantics. These properties it 
shares with <biblStruct>. Compared to <biblStruct>, <biblItem> is 
more flexible and more modular, making it a suitable base for 
large-scale 'bibliographic databases'.

James Cummings wrote:
> However, since we will be talking about this topic at the next TEI
> Council meeting, now would be a good time to put forward thoughts
> on TEI-L about biblItem (and other bibliographic elements), and any
> strange requirements you've come across in the weird world of
> phyiscal bibliography.
>
> http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ref-biblItem.html

The second example on the current reference page for <biblItem> 
contains an error: the <biblScope type="pages"> element has to be a 
child of the included host <biblItem>. This is so because in 
principle a bibliographic item can be related to several <biblItem>s, 
each time with a different page scope (cf. the example above). Thus, 
encoding the page scope on the outer <biblItem> could result in 
several contradictory <biblScope type="pages"> occurrences.

I also miss *either* a @target attribute on <biblItem> *or* pointers 
like <(x)ptr> or <(x)ref> in the content model of <biblItem> (with 
<(x)ref> in turn including <biblScope> in its content model).

Andreas Nolda
-- 
Andreas Nolda               http://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/~nolda/

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Philosophische Fakultät II
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik