I still think you are using the word 'item' differnetly than FRBR.
Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> One item may have:
> WAR AND PEACE
> LEO TOLSTOY
> and another item is exactly the same with all publication information, dates, paging, title and so on, but it has:
> WAR AND PEACE
> BY LEO TOLSTOY
>
> Is this the same item or not? Does the word "BY" make that much of a difference? In some
It can not possibly be the same FRBR item. Two books in your hand which
are identical in all respects are still different items according to the
FRBR use of the word 'item'. The FRBR item is a concrete physical
individual book in your hand.
Using FRBR termimology, you are asking if they are the same
manifestation, or perhaps if they are the same expression (and FRBR
still leaves this up to community judgement, it just provides a language
for talking about what we're judging), but they can't possibly be the
same item. The rules you discuss for determining when something is a
'copy' are rules about when something is the same manifestation or
expression (the distinction between the two has not always traditionally
been made, both subsumed in a concept of 'edition' or 'version')---but
not possibly related to determining whether two books are the same
'item'. Two books can never be the same FRBR 'item'.
A particular book that has hand-written marginalia by a particular
person---that's an item level attribute, because it really is related to
a very particular individual concrete book. Alternately, one-of-a-kind
hand-made art object 'books' (or museum artifacts when entered in a
library control system) might also be 'items'. But this sort of
item-level attribute is not something libraries are normally concerned
with. Anything that instead relates to a particular mass-produced
commodity, an attribute common to all individual books from that print
run or what have you, is a manifestation or expression attribute, not
possibly an item attribute.
Jonathan
Received on Wed Dec 05 2007 - 11:23:57 EST