melanieWacker
commented
9 years ago For MODS 3.6 the following has been proposed:
1 Specific Proposal
1.1 State and Province province will be deprecated; state will be re-defined: state-- Includes first order political jurisdictions under countries, such as states, provinces, cantons, Länder, etc. regardless of what they are called in the particular country.
See Commentary and Examples: 1.
1.2 New Attributes to Indicate Place Types
Attributes at areaType, at regionType, and at sectionType will be defined for elements area, region, and citySection respectively. These would of course be optional.
See Commentary and Examples: 2.
1.3 Indication of hierarchical level
Attribute at level will be defined for all place type elements to indicate hierarchical level. It would of course be optional.
See Commentary and Examples: 3.
1.4 Authority
The authority attributeGroup (authority, authorityURI, and valueURI) will be added to all place type elements.
1.5 Places that no longer exits
Attribute at period will be defined. Its presence will indicate that the described entity once existed but no longer exists. Its value would be a hint of when it existed (it could simply be a date). See Commentary and Examples: 4.
2 Commentary and Examples
The way MODS currently handles first level political jurisdictions -- i.e. first level below the country -- is not consistent. It was brought out that in the MARC 662 there is a subfield called "first order political jurisdiction". In MODS, both state and province are used for first order political jurisdictions depending upon what they're called in the particular country-- but the guidelines say the following:state – Includes first order political divisions called states within a country, e.g. in U.S., Argentina, Italy. Use also for France département.
province– Includes first order political divisions called provinces within a country, e.g. in Canada.
So first order political divisions mostly go under state unless they're called province. And we're silent on what they call them in other countries.
The committee thinks it desirable to put all first order political divisions under one element. The term "first order political division" or "first order political jurisdiction" is rather unwieldy. So the proposal is to deprecate province and define state as all first order political jurisdictions.
This replaces the earlier proposal to define new element placeOther and attribute at otherType, to accommodate other types of places that don't have their own element. Instead, group them together under area, region or citySection as appropriate (area is used for non-jurisdictional places, region for jurisdictional, and citySection may be used for either ) and indicate the place type with the corresponding attribute, at areaType, at regionType, or at sectionType.citySection for example is currently defined as:
citySection-- Name of a smaller unit within a populated place, e.g., neighborhoods, parks, or streets
Thus, citySection is a broad term that can be used without the
citySection sectionType="neighborhood"
for formally established neighborhoods, or
citySection sectionType="street".Note that the use of "city" here doesn't preclude towns.
area could take an at areaType attribute to accommodate some of those areas that have been suggested-- national parks, rivers, Indian reservation, etc.
MODS XML allows for the encoding of place in hierarchical form, which is frequently used and about to be revised for MODS 3.6 to increase granularity: current version: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/userguide/subject.html#hierarchicalgeographic Planned changes for 3.6: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.text.mods/1562 In the current MODS RDF draft it is "expressed in terms of a MADS Geographics": http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/modsrdf/v1/#subjectHierarchicalGeographic http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/userguide/authority.html#geographic The discussion of this element may need to be part of the larger topic of subject, but it also is a special case since it is highly structured.