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See why I think that the whole idea of the "manifestation" may be wrong? The publisher has nothing to do with the expression--the publisher deals with creating physical items. It's just that many times, librarians define these expressions by publishers, but not all the time.
Jim Weinheimer
> Martha wrote:
> > I thought it might be useful to some
> > catalog users to have the following information readily available:
> >
> > 1. The first publisher to ever publish this work.
> > 2. The first publisher to ever publish this expression.
> >
> > ...in addition to the information that we would collect
> > routinely at the
> > manifestation level:
> >
> > 3. The publisher of each particular manifestation.
> >
> > This raises a few questions. 1) Would this be useful to a
> significant
> > number of users? 2) Would this have to be collected by
> > catalogers, or could
> > it be generated automatically by computers? I suppose the
> concomitant
> > questions would be: 1) Would our hypothetical virtual
> > catalog usually have
> > all editions ever published of a particular work? 2) If not, would the
> > information be available to catalogers in a significant
> > number of cases?
>
> I would argue that by definition that a 'work' cannot be 'published' -
> the work entity is an abstract representation of an intellectual
> creation, and can't have something as concrete as a publisher. I hope
> this is not controversial. From past discussion, the issue of whether an
> expression can have a publisher is clearly more debatable.
>
> I would suggest that the question might be framed as:
>
> Might it be useful ... to be able to tell the publisher of the earliest
> manifestation of any particular expression?
>
> The publisher of the earliest manifestation of the earliest expression
> is a specific case which is the question you have expressed in 1. above
>
> I can see in some scenarios someone might want to know this information,
> but not in a finding sense - so, a scholar looking at the history of
> publication may well be interested, but it seems unlikely (although
> admittedly not impossible) that a user would be looking for the
> 'earliest published version'.
>
> In terms of whether this question could be automatically generated by a
> computer, given the right information, the answer has to be yes - given
> a collection of manifestations with publication dates, linked to
> expressions, linked to works, it should be easy enough to answer the
> question, which is the earliest manifestation linked to expressions that
> are linked to this work.
>
> In a practical sense it is unlikely that you would add manifestation
> information to your catalogue unless you actually had an item that
> related to that particular manifestation. So the ability to answer this
> question would imply that you could not only draw on information in your
> local catalogue, but also on information from across a wide range of
> catalogues (making it more likely that one of them has the earliest
> manifestation catalogued). This in turn suggests that it would need to
> be possible to say 'this work represented in my catalogue by these
> expression(s) and manifestation(s) is the same as that work in your
> catalogue represented by those expression(s) and manifestation(s)'. This
> could be difficult if we all represent things in our catalogue locally
> as now, but easier if we start to use the opportunity we have here to
> cross reference with other catalogues - from my understanding this
> linking is one of the things that adoption of RDF will help with, as .
> So rather than creating a new work record in my local catalogue, I would
> first establish if that work record existed somewhere else, and if so,
> reference it in my local catalogue. The same would go for expressions
> and manifestations, with only items necessarily having a local prescence
> (I think - need to give this more thought perhaps).
>
> I'm not sure the above is expressed that clearly - I know
what I mean,
> but in real life I would accompany with hand waving and doodles that
> would probably not help you, but would make me feel like I was making
> more sense. I'm going to follow up with a post that tries to give
> concrete examples, and I'd really appreciate others feeding back if I'm
> understanding the idea of a 'semantic web' of bib data.
>
> Owen
Received on Tue Dec 11 2007 - 06:21:30 EST