Hi Jonathan, As Esha said, PBCore might be worth looking at. It's probably one of the more complete lists. If you want something more formal than the PBCore list, the EBU also has a good vocabulary in an XML format (http://www.ebu.ch/metadata/cs/ebu_StorageMediaTypeCodeCS.xml). The nice thing about the EBU list is that some of their term definitions might help identify more obscure materials. > Have you looked at PBCore? It's a metadata standard developed by the > Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is used for tv and other > multi media cataloging. >> Jonathan Rochkind wrote: >>> Anyone know of any good existing controlled vocabulary for >>> 'format' or 'carrier' for multimedia materials? I'm thinking of >>> things like "CD", "DVD", "digital", etc. >>> >>> The closest I can get is from RDA at http://metadataregistry.org/ >>> concept/list/vocabulary_id/46.html (thanks Karen and Diane), but >>> it seems _really_ insufficient. As far as I can tell "audio disc" >>> is used for both a CD and a vinyl disc, and there's nothing >>> available there for "DVD" at all. Or for "digital". Although >>> I'm not sure what I mean by "digital", I guess CD and DVD are >>> both digital, but I was thinking of something to identify a >>> digital file on a computer network free of particular carrier. I >>> guess that wouldn't be in a carrier vocabulary at all, after all, >>> that would be sort of a null carrier. Phew, this stuff does get >>> complicated quick. Which I guess is why nobody's worked out a >>> good one yet. >>> >>> Too bad RDA's is so _far_ from good though. Any others anyone >>> knows about? >>> >>> Jonathan Chris