Hi Elena

<bibl> and <biblStruct> were designed for typical bibliographic
(library-like) applications, such as preparing your reading list, or
cataloguing a library. In such applications, you don't normally specify
the book format (or so I am told), because you are describing not the
format of a specific copy of the book, but an abstract bibliographic
entity. For the same reason, there isn't any obvious way to record, for
example, that this book once belonged to Somebody Famous, or that this
book has treacle all over page 4, or that this book is printed on india
paper. You could possibly argue that "the version printed on india
paper" is a different edition, and use <edition> for that I suppose.

This doesn't apply to <msDesc>, of course, which is why there are
elements there that could be applied to the description of individual
printed copies of a book, including such information as format. But it
would be wrong, I think, to include such elements within <bibl> or
<biblStruct> because it would imply a change in the meaning of <bibl>
itself.

There is of course no reason why you shouldn't invent a <biblFormat>
element and add it to model.imprintPart (or wherever you think it
belongs)! In the long run, however, I think we need to work a bit more
on the definition of <msItem> to expand its applicability to print items.

The content model of <imprint> contains a reference to model.global
which includes a reference to model.global.spoken, and that is the class
that brings in incident, kinesic, pause, etc. If you don't have the
spoken module in your schema, these elements won't be available inside
<imprint>. I agree that they are out of place there though -- we might
address that problem by introducing a model.global.written class
perhaps, but that needs a bit more thought.

Lou

  Elena Pierazzo wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> sorry perhaps I'm really missing something obvious but I spent an hour
> already on it without success!
>
> I need to encode within a <biblStruct> (in <sourceDesc>) the book format
> (i.e: folio, quartos, octavos...) but I can't find the appropriate
> element for that.
>
> <biblStruct> is necessary as I need the <distributor> element available
> only within <imprint> available only within <monogr> (and here we could
> discuss a while: why?)
>
> I even consider to use <msDesc> but even there I struggle to find an
> element for book formats.
>
> By the way, another thing for which I cannot see the rationale: within
> <imprint> you can use: incident, kinesic, pause, shift, vocal, writing...
>
> Thank you,
>
> Elena
>