Someone recently asked me how to designate in MODS that something is an
academic journal article. In MARC, we would show that it's an article
description by using a 773 describing the host journal and coding
Leader/07 (bibliographic level) as monographic component part. Ldr/07 of
course mixes both issuance and bibliographic level (i.e. collection vs.
single) and we've separated these in MODS by having an element issuance
with values monographic and continuing and collection=yes as an attribute
to show bibliographic level. However, "article" can be considered more
like a genre. The MARC genre list used in MODS, which was developed from
all the different coded values for genre mostly in the 008s, does not have
a value "article" as such, but does have "legal article". A number of data
elements have specific coding for legal works, and this is one.

So one thought is to generalize that term to "article" and take off the
"legal". This would not invalidate existing MARC data, but would just
generalize the term. If we did this in the MARC genre list we would also
want to submit a proposal to do this in the MARC 008/24. Are there any
thoughts about this idea, particularly in terms of impact on existing
MARC records?

Rebecca
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^^  Rebecca S. Guenther                                   ^^
^^  Senior Networking and Standards Specialist            ^^
^^  Network Development and MARC Standards Office         ^^
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