I was looking at MODS for a place to put our 880 data, not that we have a
particular need at the moment but I'd been thinking about Unicode and MARC,
and MODS came to me as a solution to some issues. The 880's are not
included in MODS. That could be because MODS is intended to be "simple",
but I suppose it could also be because it means a much more complex
character set translate from the escaped values for CJK to the thousands of
Unicode values. In any case, it would work for me because my data is
already in Unicode so that translate is not an issue.
It seems to me that there is a logical place for the alternate graphic
fields. For example title could be expanded from:
<xsd:complexType name="titleInfoType">
<xsd:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xsd:element name="title"/>
<xsd:element name="partNumber"/>
<xsd:element name="partName"/>
<xsd:element name="nonSort">
...
to:
<xsd:complexType name="titleInfoType">
<xsd:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xsd:element name="title"/>
<xsd:element name="partNumber"/>
<xsd:element name="partName"/>
<xsd:element name="nonSort">
<xsd:element name="alt_graphic"/>
...
This would finally get us (IMO) what MARC does only awkwardly, which is
linking the alternate graphic with the field that it is parallel to. The
question would be whether we want to include a data element that gives some
indication of the language or glyph set included but my impression is that
with Unicode most applications are not relying on this kind of data.
Does anyone else see this as useful, and does anyone see any particular
reasons NOT to include this in MODS?
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Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
http://www.kcoyle.net
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