[tei-council] constraints on <publicationStmt>

[Paul Schaffner]

Bear in mind that our headers (not just the TCP ones, but those for
virtually every other digitization project carried out by the library,
or
indeed by any library) are auto-generated from the MARC renditions
of rare-book bibliographic records; that standards are in flux and in
conflict (especially with the arrival of RDA); that most books in
our digitized collections have probably been catalogued using the rules
found in "DCRM(B)" (http://rbms.info/dcrm/dcrmb/DCRMB3.pdf), as
those are rendered in MARC; and that the MARC 260 field, which is
the one most likely to be in play here, is (like several MARC fields),
an unhappy mixture of a controlled data field and a free-text
transcription 
field. In the case of rare-book records, it is more transcriptional than
usual: so the publication statement is apt to be transcribed more
or less exactly as it appears on the title page or in the colophon
(etc.)  Which means that the transform of a MARC DCRM record 
to a TEI header is likely to include some problematic results.

**That said, I think this one is just a mistake.

The MARC reads:

=260  \\$aPrinted at London by R.I. for L. Chapman, and are to be 
sold at the sign of the Crown in Popes-head Alley,$c1654.

I think the cataloguer simply forgot the subfield $b, and that
the record should read:

=260  \\$aPrinted at London : $b by R.I. for L. Chapman, and 
are to be sold at the sign of the Crown in Popes-head Alley,$c1654.

which would generate this <publicationStmt>:

        <publicationStmt>
            <pubPlace>Printed at London : <pubPlace>
            <publisher>by R.I. for L. Chapman, and
               are to be sold at the sign of the Crown in Popes-head
             Alley,</publisher>
             <date>1654.</date>
         </publicationStmt>

Nowadays, TEI wants the publisher to come before the pubPlace,
but P3 was indifferent on this point, and our headers (used internally
in DLXS) are basically P3 headers. So our headers follow the path
of least resistance (that is, the sequence mostly likely to be found
in actual books, and the sequence prescribed by MARC order), in
which the pubPlace (MARC 260 $a) comes before the publisher 
(MARC 260 $b).

(MARC itself certainly allows a publication statement without a 
publisher, but whether cataloguing rules do or not is beyond me.
The rules *may* require one to put in a placeholder when
there is no publisher (i.e. "[s.n.]"), but I'm not sure about that.
There are of course innumerable publications with no publisher
specified ("Nottingham, 1678").)

pfs


On Mon, Sep 29, 2014, at 11:04, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> We relatively recently insisted that a <publicationStmt> must have some
> sort
> of authority, if the contents are structured at all.
> 
> I just met this in EEBO TCP:
> 
>                <publicationStmt>
>                   <pubPlace>Printed at London by R.I. for L. Chapman, and
>                   are to be sold at the sign of the Crown in Popes-head
>                   Alley,</pubPlace>
>                   <date>1654.</date>
>                </publicationStmt>
> 
> Do I correctly conclude the markup is just lazy/wrong, and needs to
> either extract the details, or
> wrap these elements in a <p>?
> 
> (A94356, for Paul’s benefit)
> --
> Sebastian Rahtz      
> Director (Research) of Academic IT
> University of Oxford IT Services
> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
> 
> Não sou nada.
> Nunca serei nada.
> Não posso querer ser nada.
> À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
> 
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-- 
Paul Schaffner  Digital Library Production Service
PFSchaffner at umich.edu | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/