Probably what we need (and I've thought about this before) is an attribute
for MODS <language> that tells you what portion of the resource it's a
language of. That is, in MARC terms we have separate subfields in 041
Language code to designate whether the language is of the entire work, a
translation, summary, table of contents, accompanying materials, etc.
Again, we didn't include initially in MODS because we wanted to simplify.
But there's no way to bring this out currently. The 245$l that's part of a
uniform title is a construct specific to formulating uniform titles
according to AACR2. Again, we didn't parse this one out either in order to
simplify. In my opinion it might be a better choice to add an attribute to
language to bring this out and leave the uniform title alone. Of course,
language can use textual form or code.
Rebecca
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Mike Rylander wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:07:30 -0500, Bruce D'Arcus <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > On Jan 28, 2005, at 11:39 AM, Mike Rylander wrote:
> >
> > > instead of:
> > >
> > > <titleInfo type="uniform">
> > > <title>Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban. Spanish</title>
> > > </titleInfo>
> >
> > Why not:
> >
> > <titleInfo lang="es">
> > <title>Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban</title>
> > </titleInfo>
> >
> > ... ?
> >
> > It's easy to use XSLT to attach the word "Spanish" to output based on
> > the lang attribute.
>
> Unfortunately, because the definition of 240$I spells out the name of
> the language one would need to create a map (translated for every
> language) that maps to the ISO639-2b language encodings. That sounds
> rather un-fun to me... :)
>
> Perhap I shouldn't have used the tag name "lang" in my example. To
> match the symbolic name from marc more closely perhaps a
> <languageOfWork> tag is more appropriate.
>
> The point is that there are displayable fields, such as 240$I, that
> could be separated easily, but for whatever reason are not. I realize
> that MODS is meant to be a simplification of marc, and that parsing
> out fields such as the <extent> stuff that marc does not separate
> isn't really a simplification (even though I'd like that particular
> example to happen), but I'm not sure that loosing the ability to keep
> descriptive elements (from the end users perspective) separated from
> content is worth a few less tags.
>
> <joke>
> Of course, take all of this with a grain of salt, since I'm just a
> lowly developer trying to get work done with MODS...
> </joke>
>
> --
> Mike Rylander
> [log in to unmask]
> GPLS -- PINES Development
> Database Developer
> http://open-ils.org
>
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