Institutions and acronyms

CSL Development
1

A user of legal materials has come up with a requirement for
institutional names that include the acronym, if avaiable:

ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean)
(2002), Foreign investment in latin america and the caribbean, 2001
(LC/G.2178-P/I), Santiago, ECLAC, October. United Nations Publication,
sales N°: E.02.II.G.47.

[http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-legal/msg/9067a4b0cb6b21d9]

The tricky bit is that if no acronym were available, the parens would
not be used. This raises an interesting problem with institutional
names generally: when a method for specifying institutional acronyms
becomes available, how should we control the inclusion and appearance
of the two elements?

I’ve come up with this, which I offer up for comments. (The example
uses the name “literal” for the institution name-part, that’s just
provisional – I think Bruce has suggested “name”, or "institution"
might be another choice. But that’s another story and another
thread.) Here goes:

The “acronym” attribute can be set to “before”, “after”, “never” or
"alone", which controls which of the two possible elements should
appear, and their order. If no acronym is available and the "alone"
option is used, the full institution name is used instead.

The “if-has-acronym” attribute is available only on name-part element
when the name is set to “literal”. It controls whether the formatting
attributes of the element are applied. To control only some
attributes, a separate name-part element for the literal name can be
used.

Thoughts and comments?

Frank

2

If we add a normal “institution” variable, we could achieve the same thing
by using a slightly more advanced conditional, which allows for testing on
the existence of the short form of a variable, e.g.:

For the schema, this would be a small change:

attribute variable { list { all-variables+ } }?,

(http://bitbucket.org/bdarcus/csl-schema/src/tip/csl.rnc#cl-916)
would become (something like)

(attribute variable { list { all-variables+ } }, attribute form { “long” |
“short”}? )?,

RintzeOn Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 5:07 AM, Frank Bennett <@Frank_Bennett>wrote:

3

I don’t have time/energy to look into this deeply ATM, so just
throwing out ideas …

Another option is to treat name acronyms as simple variables like
short titles, and so add a “form” value of “acronym” to a variable
such that you could somehow say:

if there’s an acronym for this name, do x; else do y

This might contradict something I earlier said; not sure.

Bruce