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Joe,  consider the following excerpt from a MODS record:
<titleInfo>
<title>Private Eyeballs</title>
<subTitle>a golden treasury of bad taste</subTitle>
</titleInfo>

…. and note that  <title> in MODS corresponds to BIBFRAME mainTitle so you could look at this as:
<titleInfo>
<mainTitle>Private Eyeballs</mainTitle>
<subTitle>a golden treasury of bad taste</subTitle>
</titleInfo>
(Even though there is no <mainTitle> element in MODS, pretend there is.)

So if you want to make this into a BIBFRAME title, the lazy way to do it might be to construct a title string from the main and sub title:

bf:title [rdfs:label “Private Eyeballs - a golden treasury of bad taste”]


Or, you could parse out the main and sub titles:

bf:title [
bf:mainTitle "Private Eyeballs" ;
bf:subtitle "golden treasury of bad taste" ] .

Or you could provide both the title string as well as the parsed title:

bf:title [
rdfs:label “Private Eyeballs - a golden treasury of bad taste” ;
bf:mainTitle "Private Eyeballs" ;
bf:subtitle "golden treasury of bad taste" ]  .


Let’s take another example.  In this MODS record, only the main title is expressed:

<titleInfo>
     <title>Reflexive interpreters and autobiographical texts</title>
</titleInfo>

So the mainTitle is “Reflexive interpreters and autobiographical texts”.  You could express this in BIBFRAME as the mainTitle, but only if you use that string verbatim.
You could express the string:
     “Reflexive interpreters and autobiographical texts – English – 1977”

But in this case you would express it as a label, not as the mainTitle because it is not the main title.

Hope that helps.

Ray



From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joseph Kiegel
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2016 11:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [BIBFRAME] bf:mainTitle

It would be helpful to have more information on the use of bf:mainTitle as opposed to rdfs:label.

The Titles specification (https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/docs/pdf/bf2-titles-apr2016.pdf) uses both in the examples.  Specifically, examples 2-5 use bf:mainTitle to hold the title string.  It seems that examples 1 and 6 could as well.  The definition of bf:mainTitle is quite broad:  “Title being addressed. Possible title component”.

Alternate Example 1:


bf:title [

a bf:Title , bf:WorkTitle ;
bf:mainTitle "Reflexive interpreters and autobiographical texts" ] .


Alternate Example 6:


bf:title [

a bf:Title , bf: VariantTitle ;

bf:mainTitle “Chartbook on aging” ;
bf:variantType “spine “ ] .


What are the criteria for using bf:mainTitle vs. rdfs:label?