rlieter@cldc.howard.edu attacks:
> Did you know that the Biblical "chapter and verse" arrangement is
> relatively new to the Bible? Perhaps only about three or four hundred
> years.
Numbering by sections of text has been the way in which people
traditionally have marked material for purposes of citation,
precisely because of everything I mentioned in my post -- there was
never the possiblity of referring to things by volume and page until
the advent of the mass-produced, bound book.
> What's more, there are serious problems with it for theologians.
> Chapters have cut off thoughts in the middle of an idea, and length of
> chapters is very irregular. Finally, chapter names are not very helpful
> when they refer, say, to Obadiah because most people don't know where
> that is in the Bible.
As a former student of postgraduate theology I can say I have never
heard of anyone finding "serious problems" with that method of
citation. Would you prefer listing several thousand parallel cites
to every major edition of the Bible for each quote mentioned?
> The books are arranged somewhat randomly just like
> cases. This could be one advantage of volume and page number, because it
> actually identifies a precise location of an item.
"Bible, Vol.9, p.21 (NEB), p.25 (RSV) p.12 (KJV, ABS ed.), p.15,
col.2 (KJV, NBP ed.) . . . "
Gosh! That's MUCH more convenient than "Obadiah 3:4"! What could I
have been thinking?
> Are you proposing numbering cases sentence by sentence? Why?
I am not proposing anything -- I was commenting on someone else's
proposal. But I believe the proposal is to number them by
"paragraph," not by "sentence." The "why" should be apparent to you
if you had followed the thread.
> How are Chapter numbers in your Biblical example different from
> page numbers?
They are portable from one edition, one format, one iteration of the
text to another.
> Do you expect cases to be reprinted to the same extent as the
> bible or the constitution? They each have been republished
> millions of times by different publishers and printers. I can't
> see cases, particularly the whole body of case law being
> republished that many times.
Here is where you are simply not getting it. You are assuming that
a single comprehensive published set of bound books is going to
continue to be the primary method by which court opinions are
disseminated, and that electronic distribution will always be a
marginal, secondary method of accessing that principal paper set.
This whole discussion got started because of certain difficulties
that have arisen out of that system vis-a-vis the growing popularity
of electronic versions. For one thing, page numbers and volumes are
no longer a constant. As electronic versions become more and more
widespread, it would be very handy to have a built-in method of
citation that does not require recourse to a bound set of books to
make sense.
What has really set people off, though, appears to be the way in
which some people have tried to use their copyright ownership of one
particular print set to leverage control over the general dissem-
ination of U.S. law; e.g., forcing the Department of Justice to
erase whole databases of cases, or suing competitors over their use
of internal page references in electronic formats. You should go
back and read some of the thread if you are not up on the issues
involved.
It is possible that phantom page numbers inserted arbitrarily into
texts could serve the needs of information consumers for the
forseeable future -- we see little <*15, **25> marks inserted into
LEXIS and WESTLAW printouts, and I suppose such numbering systems
could become the standard method of marking text for internal
reference in the future. However, I personally find it somewhat
irritating to scan back and forth through the text looking for a
little embedded code. How much easier it would be if each paragraph
were boldly numbered! Then you would have a single reference system
that could be used by publishers of loose-leaf reporters, electronic
databases, and bound books -- no more parallel cites! Don't you
occasionally find it frustrating to see a reference strictly to a set
you do not have available, having to scare up parallel cites?
Well, there are big advantages on both sides. It has been argued
that the thousands of existing volumes of reporters would ultimately
have to be refitted to make use of a new standard system based on
media-neutral cites. No matter what happens, this whole electronic
world we are embarking on is going to be a big pain in the neck. But
if you haven't seen enough by now to know that these growing pains
will be worth it, I don't think you have been looking very hard.
------------------------------------------
James Quinn, Reference Librarian, Gonzaga University School of Law
james@gulaw.gonzaga.edu / (509) 484-2833 fax / (509) 484-6092 voice
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