Hahn, Harvey wrote:
> When OCLC analyzed its database a number of years ago related to FRBR,
> it found that only 18% of the bib records could take advantage of
FRBR.
> The remainder of the database were one-time works by creators in a
> single medium, for which FRBR is unnecessary.
Karen Coyle wrote:
True for catalogs of published texts, less true for media like sound
recordings and films. (Take a look at UCLA Film Archive's catalog, where
there are multiple versions of just about everything.)
--------------------
People often seem to think that FRBR analysis is not useful for works
that exist in a single manifestation, but I wonder about that. To take
the example of film and video, it's true that the continual reissuing of
works in new formats and variations means that different expressions and
manifestations tend to proliferate wildly, but I think a FRBR-based
presentation could still be useful even for single manifestations.
I would love to be able to create work-level records for film that could
be linked to our existing manifestation-level records and if I could
somehow jumpstart this process, I would. Certainly, there would be a
great economy of scale from not having to re-enter certain types of
information every time a new version of a film comes out. But, in
addition, I think it would help us provide a better means of searching
for what I think of as work-level information (e.g., original date,
original language). For some reason, people seem to expect to be able to
search film by these kinds of characteristics in a way that they don't
expect to for books. For example, people seem to think Lawrence of
Arabia should show up under 1962 in a way that they don't expect Anna
Karenina to come up under 1877. Current cataloging does not do a good
job of consistently and unambiguously providing access to this type of
information. Nor do we have a way of sourcing this data, the way we use
the chief and prescribed parts of the item-in-hand for
manifestation-level data. Should we take the original date from the
package (where it may vary from publisher to publisher), from IMDB, from
AMG, or from some other source (and these sources often vary by a year;
occasionally I have even seen three different years listed). And is the
original date the date of theatrical release or the date production
finished?
Kelley McGrath
kmcgrath_at_bsu.edu
Received on Mon Sep 10 2007 - 06:12:27 EDT