Karen Coyle wrote:
> Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>
>> Some people think the four items is already too many (suggesting we get
>> rid of Expression, or if I understand Karen right, that we get rid of
>> Expression AND Work, and have nothing but manifestations and
>> relationships!).
>
> Nope. I'm not getting rid of anything. I'm just not casting them in
> concrete or requiring that everyone follow the same decisions about
> whether a particular item is a work or... not a work.
Well, in that, we agree entirely. But I still think that some people
_are_ going to have to make those decisions (even if one person's
differs from anothers), and they _are_ going to have to be encoded in
records. It is certainly convenient for us if we can standardize those
decisions within certain communities, but that doesn't mean that
interface systems can't then go on to make even more diverse choices
within those bounds.
How we learn to live in a world where different communities will make
different decisions about whether a particular item is part of a
particular work or not.... that's something we're going to have to
figure out.
<< But if "A is a performance of Z" means that Z is a work, doesn't "F is a
performance of C" mean that C could also be a work? >>
Says who? Are YOU saying that? Why? Is it convenient to say that?
Sounds more convenient to me to say that an expression can have an "is
performance of" relationship to a work, and to another expression.
<< As some of our music-enabled colleagues replied, by some definitions,
an arrangement is
a separate work. Could C be simultaneously an expression and a work? >>
Well, some communities could decide that C is part of a pre-existing
work, and other communities could decide that C establishes a new work.
(An item in hand is of course always an item; that's the only concrete
physical entity we have; all the others are abstract sets of items). But
could a given person decide that C both does and does not establish a
new work? No.
<< I don't know the answers, but I think we need to explore this further
before we declare that we have four possible boxes (WEMI) >>
Well, I think we've had ten years to do that, and if we haven't taken
advantage of that, we've made our bed and now we lie in it. It's too
late to go back. We must move ever forward, forward. FRBR is what we've
got. Holding up forward movement in one area (such as RDA) because FRBR
isn't perfect is a very "standards 1.0" thing to do. FRBR is what we've
got. If we haven't taken advantage of the past decade (decade!) to fine
tune it, mores the pity, but it's where we are. We can take solace in
the fact that it IS at least based on 100 years of cataloging
experience--it is our tradition formalized, it is not invented out of
whole cloth. Some find that a fault, I find that a strength. I think
it's good enough to move forward with.
"and that everything fits neatly into one or the other."
Not incredibly neatly, but good enough, and the value of having a common
skeleton to hang these things on is worth good enough.
"That's why I think it is more important to state that C is an
arrangement of Z than to say what box it fits into. It can remain an
arrangement of Z and find itself in different boxes based on different
contexts or functions."
Don't forget that an individual item in hand is just an item. Whether
the item belongs to a particular manifestation, expression, and
work---is an assignment of a relationship just like any other! Jim
Weinheimer, if I read him right, suggests that we only create 'item
records', and it be up to systems to collocate them into manifestations,
works, and expressions, as appropriate. That in some sense seems
sympatico with what Karen is saying. I think (for reasons I've
explained) it makes a lot more sense to go with what's worked well for
100 years, and say that the manifestation is the basic 'unit' record.
But whether a particular manifestation is or isn't part of a particular
expression or a particular work---is a relationship, like any other,
which will be recorded in the manifestation record like any other is.
FRBR says our experience shows it is a particularly _useful_
relationship for helping users make sense of the bibliographic universe.
But it's still just a relationship, which will be recorded in our
records, and which we need to learn how to cope with different
communities making different decisions about---just as we do every other
relationship!
Don't forget that "is this arrangement a work or an expression" is
really a shorthand way of expression what, to be more rigorous with
FRBR's taxonomy, i would express like this:
This item I have in my hand represents a manifestation M, which is a
particular recording of performance (or sheet music, or etc.) of a
particular arrangement of a particular original composition. Should I
consider this to belong to expression E1 of work W1, the work entity
established for that original composition---or should I instead consider
this to belong to expression E2 of work W2, a new work established for
this particular arrangement? I think FRBR is right that these
decisions _do_ have special prominence in establishing a bibliographic
model for our general users of general materials---but they are not the
only relationship decisions that exist, or that matter. Especially since
they are meant to be an overarching general purpose skeleton, it's quite
like that in certain communities (of users of specific material types
especially), other relationships may of equal or greater importance.
Jonathan
>
> kc
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
> ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
> fx.: 510-848-3913
> mo.: 510-435-8234
> ------------------------------------
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed Dec 05 2007 - 17:58:03 EST