>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
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