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