Source of pagination for books without ISBN

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What would be a good way of identifying the print source used for pagination when dealing with old books that have no ISBN?

Without an identifier, you're typically going to want to know the publisher, year, edition and whether the hardcover or softcover version of the source print book.

Adding those to the dc:source should allow the digital to be matched to its source.

Thanks. How would that look exactly? I mean, what kind of urn namespace do I need that says it's an arbitrary identifier?

URNs aren't required. They're recommended, particularly for the dc:identifier, but the only hard requirement is that the element not be empty.

I'd literally write that information in given that you don't have an identifier to work with.

So, for example, this would do?
<dc:source id="src-id">Publisher, YYYY, 1st edition, hardback</dc:source>

I assume all characters and upper/lower case are allowed, with & " ' < > escaped, right?

Yes, looks good to me. It's the best alternative you can provide.

And you don't have to escape quote characters in the text content of an element, although there's no harm. Escaping of double and single quotes is only necessary for attribute values when the character matches the quoting used.

Great. Thank you so much.

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