Hi Sophie,

generally speaking MODS is very flexible and you can reuse/repeat as much (or as little) from the related description as is necessary for your purposes and as long as it allows you to relate one description
clearly to the other. On a side note, I have seen some implementations using the <genre> element to help indicate the level, specially if there may be different types of levels involved,
e.g <genre>issue</genre> or <genre>article</genre>
 From the example that you send in your previous e-mail I am still not quite clear on how your system (and I am not familiar with Islandora) relates this issue description to the parent
serial record. Curious to find out more about it.
If it were presented in one single hierarchy and you are going down that hierarchy, then the relationship type would be that of a "constituent" rather than that of a "host", right?
So I am assuming that the issue level records are designed to stand on their own, but I don't see anything that would link one to the other, so maybe a bit more context would be helpful in this case?

Best,
Melanie


Thanks Melanie,
We're actually cataloging serials, serial issues and serial analytical articles in a hierarchical structure. (The system we're using is Islandora. The MODs form for serials is locally created and is not part of the default Islandora installation. The development is still ongoing.)

We have a serial record as the parent MODS record, at the same time, under that parent record, we'll have issue level records (Child records). Now our question is:
For the issue MODS record, do we need to have the full information as presented in the serial parent record, or, it is enough to only have issue and number as shown in my previous email? For catalogers, we need to add the issue and number after finishing cataloging the parent record, and a program will generate the MODS records for the parent serial and the issues. So the question is: does the program need to get inherited information from the parent MODS? Is the MODs with only the following elements
<mods>< relatedItem><part><detail><caption>...</caption><number....</number></detail></part></relatedItem></mods>
Considered adequate?

We're still trying to decide how the analytical serial article MODs record should look like. We've seen LC's sample record, but our question is that:
If we have a parent MODs serial record, does the article MODs record still need to have the full information as presented in LC's site? How many elements would be necessary or preferred? What's the best practice here?

Thank you for any thoughts or suggestion!
Sophie