Re: Some info on pagination practices

So perhaps I should have been more specific, but in fact, overly 
specific may not help us.

What we seem to have here is "number of pages" versus "pagination." 
Number of pages would be an integer, which may be accurate or 
approximate. That we have no control over. Pagination is an expression 
of the pagination patterns in the book, which can distinguish, for 
example, an edition without a preface from an edition with a 60-page 
preface. These patterns can be simple or extremely complex, depending on 
how much one's community cares about the details. (The rare book 
community cares a LOT.) The main purpose of these patterns is to present 
an observable aspect of the item being described, NOT to provide an 
accurate page count. So if the last numbered page is "603" and there are 
really only 50 pages in the book, the pagination is listed as "603". A 
diligent librarian will note that the book appears to have many fewer 
pages in fact. But for identification purposes, the OBSERVED page number 
is recorded.

I think that the essential goal should be to allow everyone to input 
what they consider to be their statement about pages. It might be:

208
[4] 13 leaves, [6] 9 p.
A1-13, B1-7, C1-83
xii, 356p.
approx. 654
603 p. [not consecutive, approx. 50 pages]

The question is: Is there a use case to include in schema.org both a 
property that is defined as an integer, and a separate property that 
takes a text string of unknown complexity for pagination? What is this 
property for?

The obvious use case is that of displaying this to the user so they can 
see if it's an 11 page or a 1024 page book. That should be satisfiable 
by any of the more normal above examples. I'm not aware of a use case 
that would require some guarantee of greater precision, but if there is 
one then we may be looking at two different properties because of the 
difference in their potential use.

Note that a proposal will be coming along that addresses articles that 
has two additional properties: pageStart and pageEnd. These are commonly 
used to aid in identification of articles in journals, and were once 
essential for "fax-to-user" services of libraries. (Odd how quickly such 
things pass.)

To sum, I would not word this as an either/or question, but as a 
question of what properties are needed to accommodate the greatest 
number of existing practices and use cases.

kc



On 12/16/13, 12:04 PM, Dave Caroline wrote:
> I dont think there can be one rule or definition for pagination in all
> books, one has to look at the book when cataloguing it and be
> sensible.
>
> The actual numbers from my quoted examples
>
> http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/0471634573
> Last page is is number 16 this book has 11 sections plus a four page
> introduction a total of 277 pages.
>
> http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/0534917852
> It has a last page number of 608, but its fat book and on further
> investigation it has a last page in the middle too of 607, so 1215
> (this book was published as two volumes but later bound as one)
>
>
> Dave Caroline
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Monday, 16 December 2013 21:53:48 UTC