One of the central functions of Current Epigraphy is notices of publication. This page provides authors with guidance on the preparation of such posts. Note the additional guidance (below) for new publications that do not seem to have been noticed by the library acquisitions community.
Readers of CurEp may review posts about publications via the publications category. Users of feed reader software may care to subscribe to the corresponding publications feed. Scholars and librarians interested in identifying important works that have escaped the notice of the library community in their country will wish to monitor the corresponding rare publications category (or the rare publications web feed).
1. Publication notices should, as a rule, be confined to new or recent publications unless the item is not well represented in library collections or digital archives and can be had (in multiple copies) from a publishing firm or print-on-demand vendor.
2. Formatting of the bibliographic information is left to the individual author; any complete, standard and easy-to-understand arrangement of bibliographic elements is acceptable. Bibliographic data copied and pasted from an online catalog system is acceptable, provided the terms of use associated with the originating resource are observed. For a book, a complete record includes: author(s), full title, place of publication, date(s) of publication, publisher, ISBN or other standard numbers (if available), OCLC number (if available) and any special notes concerning availability or purchase (especially of privately printed or irregularly distributed items).
3. Publication notices must be contained within an HTML element that carries a “class” attribute with the value “hcite”. Authors will need to select the “HTML” mode on the Word Press editor to enter the opening and closing tags or, at least, to add the attribute and its value. See, for example, the post on Funerary Inscriptions from Isola Sacra, where a “p” tag carries the class=”hcite”. If appropriate, any of the “p”, “span”, “div” and “li” tags may carry this attribute
4. When an accurate record for a work appears in Open Worldcat, the CurEp citation should include a link to the relevant record, either via the ISBN or the OCLC number. These links should always use the format http://www.worldcat.org/isbn or http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/. See, for example, the ISBN links in the post for Journal: Gephyra. Such links can, of course, be entered without recourse to hand-editing the HTML.
5. Bibliographic posts should be tagged with the CurEp category “publications” (sub “Categories” on the “Write Post” form) unless they are judged by the author to be dangerously under-represented in library collections (see 6, below).
6. Authors of bibliographic posts should always check the availability of the item cited (via WorldCat or another appropriate mechanism). If the work is cataloged in less than 5 libraries in North America or in Europe — and if the publication has been available for a sufficient period to have been acquired and cataloged (1-2 years) — this fact should be noted in prose in the post and the post should be tagged with the CurEp category “rare_publication“. It is not necessary to also tag the post with the parent category “publication.”
