On Sep 7, 2004, at 4:29 PM, Andrew E Switala wrote:
> But the MODS element <name> is (from the user guidelines) Creator
> or
> Contributor from Dublin Core, or MARC *bibliographic* field main|added
> entry personal|corporate|meeting name. You're reading too much into
> the
> XML tag.
My point is not at all obscure; it's really basic. Consider author
representation in TEI:
<author>
<persName>
<foreName>Emery</foreName>
<surname>Blackfoot</surname>
</persName>
</author>
I don't really care if the wrapper -- what is in TEI "author" -- is
called person or contributor or whatever.
>> In citation practice, the concrete issue here is that if you work in
>> multiple languages, you typically have to include both the original
>> and
>> the translated/transliterated titles and author names on the final
>> output.
>
> Ah, I get it now. I thought you mean the same name appeared in
> multiple scripts on the work when I said earlier it sounded like
> <displayForm>. In this case, extracting variant forms from an
> authority
> record sounds like far less of a "hack" than having a person
> abstraction
> in MODS. The latter would be a sort of authority record embedded
> inside
> a bibliographic record.
No; I'm not saying I want to list twenty different variations of a name
in a MODS record; I'm saying I want the two variations I must have if I
am to support scholars working with multiple languages.
Among other things, I want to embed MODS records in OpenOffice files.
So, citations point to those MODS records, and when formatting is
generated, it is by running an XSLT on those files. For that to work,
the records must be self-contained (I can probably convince the
OpenOffice people to allow embedding a MODS file, but I'm not going to
convince them to also allow a MADS files along with it).
Besides, as I said before, allowing two versions of the same name in a
record is no different than allowing two versions of a title. If you
allow coding of language and other related attributes in name, it
almost goes without saying you ought to allow for people to actually
exploit it.
Bruce
