MODS: The Metadata Object Description Schema

Fortunately, the library world is evolving very rapidly. An alphabet soup of initiatives has surfaced in the last few years, many of which may be with us for a long time. These include SPARC, DLF, OAI, W3C, XML, RDF, OWL, DCMI . . . This article is about one of the more recent—MODS, Metadata Object Description Schema, and it may be helpful to provide some background as to why it is important enough to include here. First, for the noncataloging specialist, what is it? In brief, MODS is a drastically simplified set of conventions for cataloging. It may be applied to anything, but many will see it as most useful in the Web environment. A second question: Why is it necessary? I would say primarily because of drawbacks in the Dublin Core.