To clarify some issues (maybe! Or stir the pot yet more!), and make it
clear why I agree with Owen that the FRBR model is a reasonablygood
approximation to serve as a 'skeleton' for our metadata, and why the
Group 1 relationships are especially important to the information
landscape, I'm going to throw out another way of looking at the FRBR
Group 1 entities. (I believe this is just an explanation of what's in
FRBR, not a change; just another way of explaining what's already there).
=> An item is a concrete physical thing in your hand, naturally. That's
straightforward.
=> Two items belong to the same manifestation if they are _physically
identical_. Or in the case of digital items that have no physicality, if
they are bitwise identical, I guess is the good analog.
* To be sure, some physical features are more important to us than
others. A dogeared page makes something no longer physically identical,
but we still consider it the same manifestation. So we really sort of
mean 'physically identical at the point of production'
* Also, as Jim Weinheimer usefully reminds us, we do not go the
lengths to really ensure with 100% confidence that two items are
physically identical, we just approximate, and decide that they can be
treated as physically identical for our users needs, trying to optimize
meeting user benefit per staff time put in.
=> Two items belong to the same expression if they are _textually
identical_. Or more generally for non-textual materials, if they're
information content is identical (not revised or ammended).
* This is even fuzzier than physically identical, but still of
importance to users! The FRBR report itself makes clear that
realistically, this is more like "can be _considered_
textually/information identical, for the purposes of a user community,
balanced with the resources available to make this determination." Many
users might consider two items textually identical despite some minor
trivial differences; whereas a rare books scholar might consider the
tiniest difference vital.
* And yes, it's more clear how this applies to textual materials than
non-textual, but I think it still matters for non-textual materials. Is
this print the very same pictures as this other print, or did the artist
'revise' the pictures before making the other print? With music even
trickier, but it still matters to the user if the information content
has changed or not (but with music there is less clear understanding of
when the information content has changed; the same ensemble playing the
same arrangement on a different day may be information difference that
matters to the music community).
=> Two items belong to the same work if... well, they belong to the same
work. This one is entirely culturally determined, and there's no good
way to say it in any more basic language (although FRBR tries), but
while the concept of 'work' is entirely cultural, in Western culture at
least it is a very important concept, which matters quite a bit to
users. Basically, we know it when we see it. Is this thing an edition of
Shakespear's Hamlet, or is it not? This is something that matters quite
a bit to the user, who may be looking for an edition of Hamlet, any one
will do. Or may be looking for all editions of Hamlet.
* To be sure, it's a judgement that is subjective, contextual, and
which reasonable people can sometimes disagree on--especially in edge
cases. But it's still an important one to users! Especially in strange
edge cases, one person may disagree with another about whether an item
_is_ an edition of Hamlet or not, but the notion of "Hamlet", and that
various expressions and manifestations (as defined above as sets of
items sharing physical and textual identicality) may embody
"Hamlet"---is a key thing to (at least Western) readers/users conception
of the bibliographic/information landscape. Whether the naive user uses
the word 'work' or not, it's still a key concept.
So, physical identicality, textual/information identicality, and
embodying the same work---I think these are fundamental divisions of the
bibliographic/information universe, which are very important to our
efforts to give the user a somewhat organized approach to that universe
instead of just chaos (which all too often our OPACs give them now!). I
think this means they do serve as a good basic model for the general
purpose bibliographic/information universe, a skeleton on which more
specific things can be built, but which still gives us a way to compare
and explain anatomies, as it were. I think these characteristics of
relationships between items are also especially important and basic ones
to 'bibliographic control', and therefore justified in having a central
place in the FRBR model--but that doesn't mean that other relationships
aren't also present and important, and in certain 'edge cases' other
relationships may even be more important.
Jonathan
Stephens, Owen wrote:
> Everytime I think I've got an angle on this, it seems to slip away from
> me...
>
> Alexander wrote:
>
>> Amen! Just the fact that trained professional librarians can't agree
>> easily on what is what is a *huge* hint to why there is something
>> wrong with the current model.
>>
>>
>
> In my experience the more trained professional librarians you have, the
> more likely disagreement is :)
>
> Anyway, just to throw some more opinion in the pot, for me the FRBR
> entities are a reasonably good approximation to levels at which a user
> might make an enquiry about something in a library:
>
> Do you have Beethoven's 5th?
> Do you have a score of Beethoven's 5th?
> Do you have the 1971 Norton minature score of Beethoven's 5th
> Can I borrow this item?
>
> This suggests to me that if we were to build systems modelled our data
> in this way, it would be easy to build a user focussed interface which
> could give answers to these questions.
>
> However, thinking about all this as I was writing this email, it
> occurred to me that perhaps I'm coming at this from the wrong direction.
> For me FRBR is a useful way of thinking about library stuff, and it
> frustrates me that library systems aren't better able to represent stuff
> in a FRBR type way very easily. However, perhaps this is the heart of it
> - we should be designing systems with data models that would let us
> output in a FRBRish way, but we don't need to design systems that model
> stuff in a FRBRish way.
>
> Now of course, this is what some products are doing now - but it's
> difficult because it is difficult to group the records appropriately. As
> I understand it, Martha Yee has argued that the data in the existing
> records is good enough to group into FRBRish displays, but others
> (notably Karen Coyle) disagree. My own feeling that although some
> grouping is possible, the data just isn't consistent enough (and is
> never likely to be consistent enough) to make this a particularly good
> approach.
>
> I suppose the questions I'm trying to pose are:
>
> Is our primary aim to (a) present information in a FRBR type way, or to
> (b) catalogue things in a FRBR type way?
> If (a), is (b) a pre-requisite?
> If not, are there other approaches that still result in (a) without
> doing (b)?
>
> Floating around in my mind is some idea related to James' point about
> cataloguing at the item level, and Bernard's point about referencing in
> our cataloguing rather than creating static values in our records. Is it
> possible to think of a way of creating metadata at in item level, and
> still allowing other levels to be formed flexibly?
>
> It's been a long week in FRBR land, and it may be that the above is just
> the ravings of someone who has drunk too deep at the well of metadata
> modelling.
>
> Owen
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Fri Dec 07 2007 - 10:40:49 EST