Hi, Jonathan,

Two points as you search out a solution:

1. I agree with your assessment of the current RDA carrier vocabulary.  
You might want to look at the RDA/ONIX vocabularies (still not 
registered, but there are plans to do so: 
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/dunsire/01dunsire.html).

2. These vocabularies are a start, not a finish: once RDA and the 
vocabularies are "published" there's an intention to begin improving 
them.  The first step was to get the out of the text, the second to 
build on the NSDL Registry's vocabulary development tools (some there, 
some not yet) to build them up in ways that will be much more useful.

Diane

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
>



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
>