Hi Rosa,

Interesting. We haven't had to deal with this yet (to this point, we've only digitized sheet maps). I'm curious to hear what others think, since the MODS Use Guidelines (typeOfResource refers to the original item) aren't particularly helpful in this case.

One thing that came immediately to mind: the typeOfResource element is repeatable. The usage attribute is also available for this element, so if you repeat typeOfResource, you can label one of them: usage="primary"

<typeOfResource  usage="primary">cartographic</typeOfResource>
<typeOfResource>still image</typeOfResource>

As to which value should take precedence, I'd go with cartographic because I'm fairly certain that's how our users think about aerial photographs—we consider them to be part of our cartographic materials collection. It's very likely that we'd also be deriving MODS records from MARC. Since we catalog aerial photos on the maps format (instead of the MARC visual materials format), the MODS output would be typeOfResource=cartographic.

No matter what you decide, using the genre element will certainly provide another valuable access point.

Jennifer

Jennifer A. Liss | Head, Monographic Image Cataloging
INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
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