Not as far as I've been able to determine. It's not in LOCIS (LC's catalog),
and given the nature of the W3C (an industry consortium, and not a formal
standards organization), it's entirely possible the spec. won't get into
LC's catalogers' hands, unless it does go through a formal standards body,
and even then, it might not get a LCCN; I'm looking at a catalog record for
the ISO standard on Bibliographic Filing Principles, and apparently *it*
doesn't have a LCCN.
>The editor of a journal I am associated
>with has a strong distaste for citations in the form of URL's, on the basis
>that (a) they tend to disappear, and (b) even if they stay around, the
>contents often change. Is there any way an author can produce an acceptable
>scholarly citation that references the XML standard?
Sure. The theory behind scholarly citation is to provide enough
information regarding the work in question to enable others to locate it.
If I was
preparing a citation for the XML spec in APA styling, I'd probably use
the following:
Bray, T., Paoli, J., & Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. (Eds.). (1998). Extensible
Markup Language (XML) 1.0: W3C recommendation 10-Feb-98 [Online].
World Wide Web Consortium.
Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210 [1998, December 4].
I share your editor's distaste for URLs, but until URNs are widely
used, they provide the most effective means of enabling scholars to
obtain a resource. Not providing them at this point does a disservice to
those who want to locate the information.
> More importantly, is
>there any guarantee that a researcher in 100 years' time will be able to
>find a copy of the XML standard?
No, but as has already been mentioned, keeping a resource available is
a decision made by libraries and other organizations based on their
notion of the resource's potential use/value. If the specification
is important enough, information regarding it will be made maintained;
if not, it will be lost, like 99% of the information produced.
Jerome McDonough -- jmcdonou@library.Berkeley.EDU | (......)
Library Systems Office, 386 Doe, U.C. Berkeley | \ * * /
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000 (510) 642-5168 | \ <> /
"Well, it looks easy enough...." | \ -- / SGNORMPF!!!
-- From the Famous Last Words file | ||||