I'd be grateful to have any community comment on the following example of
the use of the <description> element in mods:name. This is one option we are
considering for capturing details of the performers of digitised music
recordings in our collection, and specifically of the instruments they play
(or voice types).

<name type="personal">
<namePart>Bloggs, Joe</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm>instrumentalist</roleTerm>
</role>
<description>violin</description>
</name>

Is this an appropriate use of the element, even though it's being used to
provide additional information, rather than for disambiguation (we'd use
LCNAF forms for names in practice).

I'm aware that the other way of capturing information about performers is to
use mods:note type="performers", in the tradition of MARC 511, but, for our
purposes, performers are of as much interest as composers etc and we'd like
them to be searchable via name searches and subject to authority control.
It's a bit of a philosophical thing with MARC that it makes performers into
lesser beings than composers and writers.

Many thanks,
Matthew