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Navigating the MODS and MADS directories: What's In There Anyway?
The mods directory includes three top level subfolders: arabicLit, greekLit and latinLit, each containing MODS records for works according to their original language. Each directory then contains a series of subdirectories organized by textgroups, a key component of the Canonical Text Services (CTS) architecture.
Textgroups, according to CTS, "are traditional, convenient groupings of texts such as “authors” for literary works, or corpus collections for epigraphic or papyrological texts. Each Textgroup has a unique identifier, one or more titles (allowing titles in different languages)..." These textgroup folders in each directory then contain individual folders for each of the different works found within in these textgroups
For example,the greekLit directory contains a list of subdirectories organized by their textgroup (largely based off of TLG identifiers, with some exceptions).
The textgroup tlg0001 for the author Apollonius Rhodius includes three subfolders, because there are three cataloged works by this author:
- Argonautica-tlg0001.tlg001
- Fragmenta-tlg0001.tlg002
- Epigramma-tlg0001.tlg003
Each individual work subfolder, such as tlg0001.tlg001 then contains the actual MODS XML versions of the work in question that have been automatically assigned CTS URNs, which are then used as the names of the files, such as tlg0001.tlg001.opp-eng1.mods1.xml. For more on the creation of CTS URNs, please refer to the Perseus Catalog blog documentation on how identifiers are created for the catalog records.
These MODS XML files serve as the “source code” for the bibliographic data in the catalog and are what is edited to fix typos, add links, and or other issues with the data in the catalog.
The mads directory includes a subfolder PrimaryAuthors that contains an alphabetical list of sub-folders. Each individual letter folder (e.g. A) then includes a list of alphabetical subfolders, one for each author (e.g. Aelian). Within this individual folder there may be several files including a MARCXML file and a MADS file. The file that serves as the “source code” for the authority record that displays in the Perseus catalog is the file that ends in mads.xml (e.g. for Aelian (n82-32651.mads.xml)) and this is the file that should be edited when necessary.