[OPEN-ILS-DEV] MODS in config.metabib_field

[Dan Scott]

On 2 December 2010 12:55, James Fournie <james.fournie at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm wondering why MODS32 is the default metadata format in
> config.metabib_field, and what would the harm be in replacing them all
> with MARCXML entries.

I think the rationale was that MODS is an attempt to provide a
human-friendly aggregation of all of the many discrete elements of
MARC, and therefore does most of the work for defining
title/subject/author/series/keyword indexes. Assuming you trust the
MODS committee to know what they're doing.

You could certainly rip out all of the MODS indexes and replace them
with MARC-based indexes, but you would might end up having more rows
in your config.*_field_entry tables, and it would probably be a
surprising amount of work to basically recreate the efforts of the
MODS committee. (I say this, well aware of the gaps in the existing
out-of-the-box MODS-based indexes).

It might be interesting to see how MODS 3.4 [1] has refined the
MARC-to-MODS mappings.

1. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-3-4-announcement.html