Genre Element Help

Definition

A term(s) that designates a category characterizing a particular style, form, or content, such as artistic, musical, literary composition, etc. "Genre" contains terms that give more specificity than the broad terms used in <typeOfResource>. The terms may be from a controlled list with a designation of the authoritative list used in the authority attribute, or it may be an uncontrolled term. If no authority is specified, it is assumed that the term is uncontrolled.¹

Genre provides coded information about the record as a whole and about special bibliographic aspects of the item being cataloged.²

Form Element

The online form element appears as below:

This form element allows the user to enter the genre term and the associated authority, if the term comes from a controlled vocabulary.

Best Practices

Genre entries are repeatable. If the term comes from a controlled list, such as MARCGT or RBGENR, the authority information should be included.

Examples

The following are examples of well formatted genre:

• novel
• non-fiction
• Publishers' advertisements

SobekCM / MODS Encoding

The genre information is encoded entirely in the MODS section of the SobekCM METS files.

<mods:genre authority="lcsh">Children's Literature</mods:genre>
<mods:genre>Publishers' advertisement</mods:genre>

Metadata Mapping

MARC to MODS Mapping

• 655 ( 655 also maps in a faceted way into subjectInfo ) → genre
  
• 008 → genre

MODS to MARC Mapping

Mapping from the MODS back to MARC is the reverse of the procedure listed above.

Sources

1. MODS User Guidelines Version 3, Detailed Description of MODS Elements
2. MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data

Contributors

Nicola Hill, Mark Sullivan, and Laurie Taylor

All contributors >>