Hello!

> to define values for fuller sequencing of the display of names.
I have been thinking about this possibility too, but I did not implement
such a thing and chose to follow the MODS schema. The question is
interesting but I consider that the answer is not trivial. My aim with
this e-mail is make a try to identify some of the difficulties that such
an effort would encounter.

If you deal with ONE kind of records (for example scientific articles from
ONE periodical, within ONE narrow discipline and ONE period of time), you
may be able to find one rather consistent way to (group and) sequence the
several authors of each article.

Dealing with different journals or disciplines, you will soon notice that
different strategies are used to group and / or order the authors: Authors
may be grouped on different lines (according to some criteria) and
alphabetically ordered within each line (or paragraph if there are dozens
of authors) but completely different strategies (affiliation, seniority,
etc.) may be used to group and sort authors in other publications.

Finding a consistent and accurate way to deal with all that is rather
difficult if MODS is to be useful for a wide range of scientific articles,
novels, books for children and much more.

Of course, we could consider different classes for "author grouping":

- typographic according to the font characteristics used to write the name
of each author

- "topographic" according to where the name of each author occur on the
page(s)

- relational to the other authors' names

- cluster-wise (for example if several names are on the same line)

Let us also consider the fact that different authors may have had
(slightly) different roles.

Maybe other people on the list have other ideas or experience about those
questions.

Regards!

Saašha,