Apparatus files about vmcp-upconversion

[LucasHorseshoeBend]

I've been in London without access to www, so apologise for the delay in responding.

OK, I won't do anything with the structure of the file as I edit it, unless you tell me the link can't be made.

[Conal-Tuohy]

Can you clarify what you mean by "linking of the citation to Mueller's publications"? Did you have in the mind the ability to convert the citation into a hyperlink to e.g. a library catalogue record?

[Conal-Tuohy]

I don't think it's necessarily the case that you would need to convert the bibliography from its current form (i.e. as a text containing a bibliography) into a spreadsheet or relational database. It might depend on what you wanted to achieve by it, though.

If the bibliography is sufficiently conventional then it may be easy enough to automatically recognise the components of each citation (e.g. titles in italics) and tag them explicitly (e.g. titles using a TEI <title> element). Gavan may have mentioned a project he and I were both involved in -- the ISIS cumulative bibliography of science -- which has had TEI bibliographic markup added automatically (with a reasonable success rate).

The ISIS bibliography was on a scale that made automation of the markup the most practical approach, but in your case, it would certainly also be feasible for you to manually add the semantics you've listed above (author, reference number, notes, and various publication details) by distinctly formatting the various parts of each citation using an appropriately named "character style" in Word. These could then be converted into the equivalent TEI elements very straightforwardly (i.e. with very little work on my part). Maybe take a quick look through the 3.11 Bibliographic Citations and References section of the TEI guidelines. If you were to format the citations using styles whose names matched the TEI elements which are defined there, then that would simplify the conversion process.

Either way, continuing to work in a word-processor and producing bibliographic TEI markup would have the advantage that the bibliography would be at the same time:

• a text in its own right (and could be presented alongside the letters etc in XTF or some other TEI-presentation framework, or in print)
• a structured data source that could be exported into a CSV or converted into some other bibliographic data format

[LucasHorseshoeBend]

The idea was to be able to link a reference given in a footnote to the corresponding entry in the bibliography, which is always of the form of a code Byy.mm.XX where XX is a running number allocated in the oprder in which we found the citations, not in date order. mm is sometimes 13, to indicate an undetermined month, and sometimes 14 to indicate a joint authorship.
So fn 3 of http://vmcp.conaltuohy.com/xtf/view?docId=tei/1850-9/1853/53-02-03-final.xml
contains references to two items that are listed in Appendix B Mueller bibliography (I can't generate a citation for that file)

What we want to be able to do is to generate an link internal to the site to enable the reference to be decoded quickly.

The bibliography is not as standard as I would have liked, but the project inherited the format and a published source to which we needed to preserve a correspondence. I would be surprised if it was as easy to read it in as it is, but the idea of character styling elements is very valuable, as I will need to edit the text in any case to remove infelicities and inconsistencies in the way that sources are given. I will character styling after Christmas and put a sample of entries into a folder for you to try out linking

[Conal-Tuohy]

I understand about the linking now. You want to be able to link from a footnote to the corresponding full citation in the bibliography.

I think it would be possible to recognise those references and convert them into a link automatically. The reference numbers in the bibliography seem pretty distinct in their formatting and placement, and the Bnn.nn.nn format used in the footnotes is also unambiguous.