MODS format

The Library of Congress Links to an external site.'s Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) Links to an external site. version 3.1 format is an XML format for bibliographic metadata.

Chris Putnam, bibutils's author, has written a good introduction to MIDS http://bibutils.refbase.org/mods_intro.html Links to an external site.

MODS has a much greater range of information it can express than BibTex. For example, for every thesis there should be at least an English and Swedish abstract. Moreover, there may be abstracts in other languages (for example, one of my current student's thesis will have an abstract in French). [Having the abstract in French, Spanish, Italian, etc. is often very important for exchange students as it means that they do not have to do a second thesis or extended abstract for their home university. This is a lesson I learned many years ago.] I can easily tag the language of an element in MODS. Additionally, I have to include the student's name, affiliation, and KTHID number; the examiner's name, affiliation, and KTHID; similarly for the supervisor; the school's name and university's name as publisher, which degree, place of the oral presentation, date, time,language; number of credits, ... .