For sure you can do it, and it isn't wrong -- I guess what I wonder is, once you start explicitly encoding this type of relationship, wouldn't you have to continue doing it in order to keep your collection descriptions up to date?  To use this example, every time you got a new letter by that person, you've have to go back into all the other letters by that person and explicitly encode their relationship to this new letter.  That seems both risky (it woud be easy to miss one) and unnecessarily redundant (since the "relationship" is already visible through the other metadata of <subject> and @role="creator"). 

I guess in the end -- as with so many things in the world of archives -- it depends on your situation :)  I can see times that this might make sense.  You'd have to look at the cost-benefit and the long-term implications.

Michele

-----Original Message-----
From: Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of McAulay, Lisa
Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2019 12:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MODS] RelatedItem for Content Relation

Hi All,

I’ll provide the opposite perspective. While it’s not necessary to encode, it shouldn’t be precluded. I’m wondering if the otherType attribute might help. I also will double check whether the type attribute is required. Because just putting in a link in the related item tag also seems quite appropriate. 

Best,
Lisa

———————————
Elizabeth McAulay
Head of the Digital Library Program
UCLA Library
email: emcaulay /at/ library.ucla.edu

> On Jan 8, 2019, at 9:19 AM, Michele R Combs <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure that kind of relationship needs to be explicitly encoded.  I'd think it would be sufficient to tag the items with the same <subject> and name/role="creator" information, and leave it at that.
> 
> Think about the library catalog.  If we have two books by the same author, we don't manually create a "relationship" between the two books -- we just let the fact that they have the same author speak for itself, right?
> 
> Michele
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Metadata Object Description Schema List <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Talj Harper
> Sent: Tuesday, January 8, 2019 11:25 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [MODS] RelatedItem for Content Relation
> 
> Dear MODS Community --
> 
> I am helping on a project to migrate some old Dublin Core metadata into MODS, and I have found myself stumped over the <relatedItem> field. I have a series of letters that were listed in each others relatedItem field and I'm trying to figure out 1) what the relationship type is and 2) whether these really should be listed under relatedItem at all.
> 
> From what I can gather, the letters were originally listed as "related" because they share the same author, were written on the same day, and are about the same topic -- but sent to two separate people. The content of the letters, however, is not identical.
> 
> Looking at the type attributes for <relatedItem>, there really isn't anything that fits. I came across an older thread in the Listerv archive about how the <relatedItem> field was meant for  bibliographic relationships rather than content relations, which may be my problem here.
> 
> Is there a way to keep this relation between the two letters in MODS? And, since I'm sure I will find more of these relations as I go through legacy metadata -- what, in general, is the best way to indicate a content relation between items?
> 
> Talj