At 09:18 AM 4/16/2003 -0400, Jerome McDonough wrote:

>The only other obvious difference to me is that METS assumes that the
>information in
>Karen's/David's caption element would just be placed inside the orderlabel
>element in METS (so "orderlabel='p. 47'" in METS, vs "number='47'
>caption='p.').
>But if the intent of a change to MODS would be improving the ability to encode
>citations, I'm betting someone somewhere would want the caption kept separate
>from the number for formatting purposes, so K/D's approach is preferable
>to METS' for that purpose.

I do think it is desirable for the number and the caption to be separated
where possible. One reason is that the captions in metadata are often not
the "real" captions -- English-speaking indexing services turn the journal
level captions in articles to "volume" or "v." and "number" or "n."
regardless of the language of the journal (and therefore what is printed on
the journal itself). As we try to cross linguistic boundaries, the only
possible link will be the numbers themselves, not the captions. Of course
calling these numbers is also a bit of a misnomer -- you can have Part B,
or Issue F1. And I do not want to have to figure out what we will do with
"Summer, 1996" other than leave it in a text field. (I was witness to a
recent discussion where a library system insisted on treating "Winter" as
the 12th month, but the item was being published in the Southern hemisphere
in June.)

An example of a use of these records would be in citation software.
Depending on your citation style the enumeration may be expressed as "1993,
v. 3, n. 7" or "3:7, 1993". That's easier to do if the captions are
separate (or even eliminated, which citation software seems to do).

kc