Series membership and numbering

[osma]

Many documents (e.g. doctoral theses and reports) are published in a series, often with a registered ISSN. The publications within a series may be numbered consecutively. For example, this doctoral thesis, which is also the subject of a SRAP example, was published in the series "Acta Universitatis Lappeenrantaensis" as publication number 960 within that series.

Does SRAP need to cover this? If so, how should it be represented?

Simplistic solution:

:mypub dct:isPartOf :series ;
    ex:numberInSeries “123” .

:series dct:title “My Series” ;
    dct:identifier <urn:issn:xxxx-yyyy> .

...but this doesn’t allow for multiple series with different numbering.

Series Statement solution

A more advanced solution would be to define a new SeriesStatement entity that is analoguous to the 490 and 830 fields in MARC, something like this:

:mypub ex:seriesStatement :seriesStmt . 

:seriesStmt a ex:SeriesStatement ; 
    dct:title "series title" ; 
    dct:identifier <urn:issn:xxxx-yyyy> ; 
    ex:numberInSeries "42" . 

[osma]

Series Statement is preferred at SRAP meeting 40

[osma]

Jan posted this to the DC-SRAP list on 2024-01-25:

Are there any existing ‘Number within Series’ properties

Schema.org has a CreativeWorkSeries element which has a ‘position’ sub-element. ‘The emphasis with CreativeWorkSeries is on published materials (written e.g. books and periodicals, or media such as TV, radio and games).’

https://schema.org/CreativeWorkSeries

Schema.org also has a bookSeries element:

https://schema.org/BookSeries

which also includes a ‘position’ sub element for number within the series.

While it seems to me that it's wrong to use the position property on a CreativeWorkSeries or BookSeries entity (the series is supposed to be reusable, so it can't include information that is specific to individual works in that series), it can also be applied to individual CreativeWork entities: https://schema.org/CreativeWork

[kcoyle]

I see two different things here:

1. describing the series as a resource
2. describing a resource in a series

From what I know of US cataloging practices, there has been a recent de-emphasis of creating metadata for series' themselves, therefore at least here there may not be a local library bibliographic identifier for the series (although it may have an issn). Again, I revert to questions of functionality - why create a separate node for a series title? There are not many monographic series that are likely to be cataloged with SRAP, so sharing an entry for the series title doesn't add notable efficiency. In terms of searching, a word search on a series element as it appears in records for individual volumes should suffice.

I'll add that in many cases the series is a publisher convenience or promotion, and not something an information seeker would focus on. Citations would be to individual publications in the series. This is not unlike the way that users search for articles in journals, with the journal itself rarely being the main interest. Unlike journals, though, the number of series items that I would guess would be described using SRAP would be low.

[osma]

Maybe we could represent series membership for e.g. doctoral theses like this:

:docthesis 
  dct:isPartOf [
     a ex:SeriesStatement ;
     rdf:value "Acta Universitatis X" ;
     ex:numberInSeries "123" ;
     bibo:issn "1234-5678" ;
  ] .

This would allow more than one series per document.

[osma]

I will do a PR that explains this, and a simpler modeling option, in more detail. Let's see how it goes