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Keywords

Online cataloguing, Standards, Archives

Abstract

This paper describes the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), its accompanying documentation and some of its applications. It reviews the MODS user guidelines provided by the Library of Congress and how they enable a user of the schema to consistently apply MODS as a metadata scheme. Because the schema itself could not fully document appropriate usage, the guidelines provide element definitions, history, relationships with other elements, usage conventions, and examples. Short descriptions of some MODS applications are given and a more detailed discussion of its use in the Library of Congress's Minerva project for Web archiving is given.

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The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm

The need for a rich XML-based descriptive metadata standard, such as the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), has been expressed by members of the digital library and related communities, as they attempt to implement projects involving search and retrieval, management of complex digital objects, integrating metadata from library databases with other non-MARC sources, and other functions. There are several applications that have a metadata component for which it is desirable to have richer metadata than those which are offered by the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set but are less complex and more user-friendly than full MARC21 with its numeric tags (Dublin Core Initiative, 2003). Sally McCallum discusses some of these in her article in this issue.

Users of MODS benefit from the energetic and systematic support of the Library of Congress staff and others who have developed the MODS fields based on vast and broad experiences. LC has supplied detailed documentation, examples of usage, and other supporting materials such as guidelines and local policy to facilitate the use and adoption of MODS. It will remain well supported, maintained and documented because of the commitment of the Library of Congress to standards development and the contributions of outside participants.

MODS user guidelines

Need

In order to use a metadata element set, particularly for the creation of new records, it is necessary to have both the available elements and their meanings (semantics), a method for encoding them (in the case of XML, a schema), a...

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