Here's my "usual" reply to the idea of adding a data element to identify the language of each field. There are fields, like the author's name, which do not render themselves easily to the "language" concept. Carlos Weintraub Marie O'Reilly etc. Which is ok because you can just skip the language data element for proper names. There are also many titles that are not clearly in a single language, or that at least would be hard to identify: Title: Ciao, bella, ciao : roman Chacon, Jorge. John F. Kennedy. [Quito, Ecuador, "La Prensa catolica", 1964.] Dollen, Charles. John F. Kennedy. [Boston, St. Paul Editions 1965] Which doesn't mean that a field-by-field statement of the language is not useful, it's just that it may have to be applied selectively. It's much easier to attribute language to the elements of metadata that are provided by the cataloger rather than taken from the item itself, and it is vital to attribute language to elements like subject descriptors. So I think the question becomes whether we need a field-level language indicator, or if Donna Dinberg's "language of cataloging" serves enough of our needs. kc ********************************************* Karen Coyle [log in to unmask] http://www.kcoyle.net **********************************************