Dear Jenn,

The specific target for the Zotero export Richard has helped us with is a MODS implementation we are developing, in cooperation with eXist Solutions, as basis for a metadata framework for our institute. Being open sourced, we hope it will also be of use to others (and attract developers). 

In the process of making an XForms editor for the full 3.4 schema, as well as more handy input templates, I often come across parts of MODS that I think could easily be improved. Just to mention a simple one: we deal a lot with material that is in non-Latin scripts with transliterations, and setting identical transliteration values in the many places now allowed is quite cumbersome: if transliteration could be set as a global value (along with language and script), this would be a definite improvement (we use an extension for this now).

Tamboti, which has several other useful features, can be installed from the package repository of a installation of eXist 1.5 <http://exist-db.org/>. The source code can be studied at <http://exist.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/exist/apps/tamboti/>. The editor will be a work in progress for some time still. 

Regards,

Jens

Jens Østergaard Petersen
University of Heidelberg
Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe"
IT Department
Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Gebäude 4400, Raum 005a
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
web: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de

On Aug 3, 2011, at 8:12 PM, Riley, Jenn wrote:

> This is extremely helpful - thank you so much.
> 
> Jenn
> 
> 
> 
> On 8/3/11 11:29 AM, "Richard Karnesky" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> On 01/-10/-28163 11:59 AM, Riley, Jenn wrote:
>>> 
>>> In the meantime, and speaking only for myself here, it would help me to
>>> hear more about your use case. I do of course see the inherent
>>> attractiveness and potential of making this element into more structured
>>> data. (And I hope a more formal data model for MODS 4.0 would go a long
>>> way towards this.) However, the Editorial Committee has found it helpful
>>> to work from actual real-world use cases, as you can imagine it's pretty
>>> difficult to design around all theoretical possibilities. Can you tell
>>> us
>>> more about what you're trying to do? You mention the Zotero MODS
>>> exporter
>>> - are you pushing data from a format that does have units as a data
>>> element into MODS? Is there a specific target for this MODS data in
>>> mind,
>>> or is it a desire to have as granular an export as possible for
>>> (unspecified) downstream applications?
>> 
>> The Zotero database has a field for the number of pages in a whole
>> resource & it would be nice to retain this structure.  refbase and other
>> reference management software have formal mechanisms for specifying
>> total pages as well.  For what it is worth, I'm not aware of any end
>> user software that formalizes the other information that is stored in
>> the extent (e.g. number of figures).
>> 
>> While eXist (who had initially asked for the changes to Zotero) does
>> have a specific product they're importing this MODS into, they also have
>> some amount of control over the importer for that product, so can bring
>> it into line with whatever formalism is agreed on.  I'm personally
>> interested in clean import into any downstream application (including
>> both refbase and zotero) in the future.
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> Rick
>>