An Application Profile of MODS to Describe Complex Digital Musical Audio Resources

Abstract

We describe the development of an application profile of the metadata schema MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) to describe complex digital musical resources at the University of York (specifically, the Music Preserved archive and John R. T. Davies jazz collection). The profile makes use of the MODS <relatedItem> element to create “bilevel” records, in which component parts of a recording can be described in the same amount of detail as the whole. This is useful where recordings contain several musical works and other nonmusical elements, such as applause or announcements. Such recordings may be regarded as historical, as well as musical, artefacts, and we discuss the implication of this for metadata. We considered the abstract model Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as an alternative approach to MODS but concluded that our conception of musical recordings as historical artefacts challenged the primacy of the “Work” concept in FRBR. We concluded that MODS was a suitable schema for the kind of metadata we wanted to create but that it could benefit from being more flexible in some of its concepts.