Does this give anyone else a headache?
Anyway, I can follow Martha's argument for putting the edition and
publication statements in the Expression. My own reading of the FRBR
Final Report (http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm) suggests that
it acknowledges this partially, so while it says
"Strictly speaking, any change in intellectual or artistic content
constitutes a change in expression. Thus, if a text is revised or
modified, the resulting expression is considered to be a new expression,
no matter how minor the modification may be."
It also recognises that:
"On a practical level, the degree to which bibliographic distinctions
are made between variant expressions of a work will depend to some
extent on the nature of the work itself, and on the anticipated needs of
users"
It then goes on to say:
"Variant expressions in the same form (e.g., revised versions of a text)
will often be indirectly identified as different expressions because the
variation is apparent from the data associated with an attribute used to
identify the manifestation in which the expression is embodied (e.g., an
edition statement)."
And then:
"Whenever the production process involves modifications, additions,
deletions, etc. that affect the intellectual or artistic content, the
result is a new manifestation embodying a new expression of the work."
What isn't clear (to me) is how the review group envisaged how the
indirect identification of a different expression based on the
manifestation would work. It suggests to me that on the cataloguing of a
new edition, there would be both a new expression, that would be
(possibly) identical to the existing expression, and then a new
manifestation from this that would make it explicit that this was a new
edition.
So, I can see why Martha wants to just put the edition and publication
information into the expression instead.
What I can't see is why James wants to put it in the Item. The Item
entity would seem to me the least controversial entity. Surely the point
about the Item is it should contain information that is specific to that
single physical item.
Owen
>
> I agree that the expression/manifestation/item is messed-up
> in FRBR, and while edition statements should certainly go
> into expression, I'm not so sure that publication information
> should as well. I realize that this has always been the
> practical way of determining expressions. But still, if we
> put the publication information into the expression, it seems
> to me as if it will have serious consequences in the future,
> as different formats with the same expression will come up
> more and more often, especially as different agencies will
> have different rules determining manifestations, such as the
> differences between LCRI 1.0 vs. "Differences between,
> changes within" from ALA. Many other rules will probably have
> their own formulations of manifestation, e.g. ONIX with
> differences in ISBN/hardcover/softcover; when I worked for
> the UN, we had different rules, and so on. I think one of the
> purposes of FRBR should be to attempt to bring these
> different records together, as much as possib!
> le.
>
> Additionally in the future, we will be able to measure
> extents of expressions by word counts, check sums, or simple
> file compares, something we could never before think of doing
> except through an incredible amount of tedious work (nobody
> except antiquarian book dealers or textual scholars check
> different copies word for word), and we do "trust" the
> publishers on this (too much sometimes)).
>
> I still believe that the problem is with the concept of the
> manifestation, which is only a "virtual view" of the
> work/expression/items, depending on how you want to define
> the manifestation. This is quite different from the other
> entities. To me, publication information should definitely go
> into the item record(!), while dates should be expanded much
> more than they are now. Catalogers are told to either add
> dates or ignore dates based on all sorts of reasons. All of
> this could wind up being more accurate than it is now.
>
> The "manifestation view" could be generated from the RDF very
> efficiently.
>
> James Weinheimer
>
Received on Tue Dec 04 2007 - 12:08:54 EST