Date:         Mon, 2 Dec 2002 19:20:44 +0100
Reply-To:     Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
Sender:       Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
From:         Yves Pratter <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: Title element and subtitles
Comments: To: Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]>
In-Reply-To:  <[log in to unmask]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

>The only reason why we did not include <subtitle> as a separate element in
>MODS is that we were trying to keep the number of elements at a minimum to
>make for easy metadata creation and generally a less complex format than
>MARC.
Rebecca, you're right.

But i think that adding some features of MARC to MODS is not a big overhead,
and it could be very usefull.
The complexity of MARC is not (for me) to have a lot of features (too much
?).
I think it's a preciousness.

The problem is the MARC esoteric coding :
- tag with numbers, non (english) words.
- esoteric indices.
- MARC flavours (MARC21, LC-MARC, UK-mARC, INTERMARC, UNIMARC, ...)
- elements level limited to two (fields, subfields)
- even in MARCXML, subfield values like "20021009d2002 m y0frey0103 ba" mean
... nothing !
- to determine the <typeOfResource> and the <genre>, you should parse at
least 3 subfields !
- i probably forget a lot of things.

So, even for "amateur" XML/MODS is universal and easy to understand (even
with more features).

>MODS is not supposed to have an equivalence for every MARC element.
yep

>In the case of title/subtitle, we thought it could just be concatenated
>without separately identifying subtitle.

>Do others see a rationale for separately identifying subtitle (other than
>the fact that MARC does)?
For long titles (like conferences), it could be usefull to distinguish
title/subtitles to print only the title in WebPAC search result for example.

--Yves