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In many MODS records harvested from several sources, I see <mods:publisher>s.n.</mods:publisher> or something similar (worst I have seen: 000NOPUBLISHER000) to indicate the publisher is unknown or that there is no 'official' publisher. For unknown information, I think leaving elements out makes sense. However, for information known to be missing, something else may work better. For example, for the place of production, RDA (or at least the draft from 2008) ยง2.7.2.6 specifies

If neither a known nor a probable local place or country, state, province, etc., of production can be determined, record Place of production not identified.

Are there special field values (perhaps "unknown") or structural elements (perhaps an attribute unknown="true") to indicate 'this value is known to be missing'/'not identified'?

(Edit: added RDA example.)

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BTW, I joined the MODS mailinglist after my question here, and posted the question (with a link to here) on January 10, 2013. – Ben Companjen Jan 18 at 21:22

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I don't think there would a way to express this in MODS. MODS is a data structure standard, and having a consistent manner of representing "missing" data is more the domain of a data content standard.

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I think you're right that there is no way to consistently represent data missing in MODS, but much (if not all) of the data structure follows from the content it needs to represent. I've seen a discussion on the MODS list about representing "et al." as a special 'name', which also touches on the distinction between content and structure. There's probably a lot more to discuss in this area. – Ben Companjen Jan 18 at 21:32

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