On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Ruth Bogan wrote:

> Good afternoon, Everyone--
>
> Rutgers is involved in building the New Jersey Digital Highway
> (http://www.njdigitalhighway.org/), and we have decided to throw our
> lot in with MODS for descriptive metadata in our Fedora repository.I
> have a couple of questions:
>
> 1. For administrative reasons, we have chosen to designate a single
> primary title for each of our resources, and allow multiple alternate
> titles. That means that "title" can appear once, and "title" with
> type="alternative" can repeat. Apparently, there's a functional
> problem caused locally by not having a value for type with the
> nonrepeating "title" element in our configuration. Since the use of
> type is optional anyway, is there any reason not to have a type="main"
> or some similar term?

The values for type are enumerated in the schema and "main" is not one of
them. We did discuss this early on whether we wanted to include a
type="main" but decided not to. One would assume that if there is no type
that it is a main title and we didn't want to force people to designate
the main title. I am not clear what sort of functional problem you would
have by applying it this way, i.e. all but the main title will have
type="alternative", since that is how the schema is written.

> 2. It looks as if the relatedItem structure can be used to designate
> that a resource is a part of a collection or collections. It appears
> that type="host" might be the right choice for this. Is that how you
> see this? I'm asking because the term "host" makes us a bit uneasy.

Yes, it certainly can. If you want to reference the collection you would
use relatedItem with type="host". We do this at LC in our MODS record for
individual Web pages in a Minerva event-based collection. Example is:
http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/elec2002/ulmer-record.html
(the nice display from an XSLT stylesheet of this MODS record):
http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/elec2002/ulmer-record.xml
You will see that we have a relatedItem type="host" and a title and link
to the main collection. In the HTML display we didn't use host but
collection title.

Rebecca
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^  Rebecca S. Guenther                                   ^^
^^  Senior Networking and Standards Specialist            ^^
^^  Network Development and MARC Standards Office         ^^
^^  1st and Independence Ave. SE                          ^^
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> Sorry if these are questions that have been asked already. I'm a
> fairly new member of the list.
>
> Looking forward to your insights.
>
> Ruth
>
> Ruth A. Bogan
> Head, Database and Catalog Portal Management Section
> Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
> 47 Davidson Road, Busch Campus
> Piscataway, NJ 08854-5603
> Ph.: 732-445-5906
> Fax: 732-445-5888
> Email: [log in to unmask]
>
>