Since iso639-2b is the established authority for expressing language in
descriptive cataloging in the library world, I don't think that MODS can
or should compel its users to use RFC3066. This is
particularly true for the MODS language element, which is intended to
express the language or languages of the material being described, and
not the language of the content of the description (the content of the
MODS elements themselves). I would be concerned, among other
things, as to whether the iso639-2b and RFC3066 will always be precisely
synchronized.
If an institution is using iso639-2b in the language element to describe
the language or languages of the material, then they may well want to use
the same codes to describe the language of the content of specific
elements, rather than to have two sets of codes going in the same MODS
encoding.
Maybe a better, more flexible way to set up a language attribute group
than my previous suggestion would be something along the lines of the
following:
<xsd:attributeGroup name="LANGUAGE">
<xsd:attribute
name="LANG" type="xsd:string"
use="optional"/>
<xsd:attribute
name="XMLLANG" type="xsd:language" use =
"optional"/>
</xsd:attributeGroup>
This would give maximum flexibility. The authority (ISO639-2b or RFC3066)
would be implicit in the attribute used. MODS users could then use
either or both as they felt appropriate.
Rick
At 05:50 PM 12/17/02 +0100, you wrote:
I wrote a working
example of displaying language name from ISO639-2B / RFC3066
code.
I start from the
MODS
HTML Display (Stylesheet) (translate
it to french) and add a template "DisplayLanguage" with to
parameters :
- the attribute name used for the search (iso639-2b or rfc3066)
- his value (the language code)
The result is the language name (in french - but you could select english if you want).
It use the file languages.xml.
If MODS will use ONLY RFC3066 language code in the future, the code will be more simple...
You could have a look or download these files from the CVS repository of the MODS-FR project :
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/mods-fr/xsl/mods-fr.xsl
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/mods-fr/xsl/languages.xml
Yves
PS: i hope to have a running example directly from the mods-fr web site in a near future.
Yves Pratter
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