On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 12:12 AM, Marc Truitt wrote: > These functions are at the very heart of modern cataloguing rules and > have been for well over a century. They are quite apart from MODS or > MARC and should not be confused with them. MODS and MARC are merely > reflecting in code these longstanding approaches to organizing > bibliographic information. Thanks for your list. But again, I'm not questioning the "functions"; I'm saying they can be better coded in MODS. Let's look at this: > 1 Smith, John, 1618-1652 Selections 1660 > 1 Smith, John, 1618-1652 Selections 1673 OK, here we seem to have two unique names for the same person. Why? Shouldn't there only be one name listing for each person? (This is not a trivial point, I might add, because if I am looking for all the records from a given author, I cannot ever be sure I have found them all, because they are commonly stretched across entries and they're rarely clearly labeled in my catalog at least). What if instead, this name was coded like this: <name type="personal"> <namePart type="given">John</namePart> <namePart type="family">Smith</namePart> <date type="birth">1618</date> <date type="death">1652</date> <description>poet</description> </name> And the search result gave me: Smith, John poet 1618-1652 That would allow me to unambiguously find which "John Smith" I was looking for. Or alternately, the search interface itself allowed me to identify all the holdings of poets born between 1600 and 1625? (And an even larger question: we have the DOI to uniquely and unambiguously identify digital objects; why not names?) Bruce