The Online Audiovisual Catalogers Cataloging Policy Committee (OLAC
CAPC) will be holding a brainstorming session on possibilities and ideas
for work-level records for film and video during the second half of our
meeting at Midwinter in Philadelphia. We hope to form a task force to
flesh out the ideas generated in the discussion and ideally to try to do
some proof-of-concept experiments.
If you are interested in this topic, please join us at the Philadelphia
Marriott (Downtown), Room 302-304 on Friday, January 11, 2008 at 8:30
p.m. I have included some thoughts I wrote to start the discussion off
below. The full meeting agenda will soon be available at
http://www.olacinc.org/capc/new.html. If you have ideas to share or
would like to be involved in this project and cannot attend the meeting,
please contact me at kmcgrath_at_bsu.edu.
Thank you.
Kelley McGrath
Chair, OLAC Cataloging Policy Committee
Some Thoughts on Work Records for Moving Images
Work records for moving images would be a high-value proposition
because:
* Users often want to search on work-level attributes and we don't
do a good job of encoding some of these attributes in our
manifestation-level bibliographic records
* Moving images tend to be re-released in different variations
(widescreen vs. fullscreen; director's cut vs. theatrical release) and
format (DVD, VHS, etc.) so the ability to encode and reuse work-level
data would have real economic benefits
* Videos are an important and popular part of many library
collections (high circ in public libraries; used for films studies and
lots of instructional purposes in academic libraries)
As far as I can tell, what we would need is something like the
following:
1. Infrastructure for creating, storing, and sharing work records
2. Work records that contain:
o identifier for the work
o links to equivalent work identifiers (IMDB, allmovieguide, etc.)
o identifiers for or links to manifestations if these can be established
(OCLC#, ISBN, publisher's numbers (non-standard, non-unique, basically
messy, but usually in bib records), possibly some sort of search based
on title and, at least for features, director)
o interesting information about the work in a useful form, such as:
o original title
o variant titles
o original language
o original release date
o country of production (most commonly defined as location of production
company or companies)
o people (director, producer, writer, cast, etc.)
o production companies
o links to related works (based on, sequel to)
o summaries (possible problematic as most of the ones in existing bib
records are cribbed from somewhere)
o subjects, genres, information about setting (place, time period,
event), characters, etc.
o awards
o color, b&w, etc.
o sound or silent
o aspect ratio
o maybe user-contributed data, links to reviews, etc., etc.
3. A mechanism for tracking where the info came from (extracted from bib
records, IMBD/allmovieguide, title frames of video, cataloger's guess,
publisher's website, reference book, etc.) as well as change history and
possibly some sort of prioritization of reliability of sources.
It would also be desirable to provide an interface for searching, maybe
something like OCLC's FictionFinder (http://fictionfinder.oclc.org
<http://fictionfinder.oclc.org/> ) except with the ability to limit to
the local collection.
It seems to me that a first pass at populating moving image work records
could be made by extracting data from a large pool of bibliographic
records or other sources followed by human review, particularly of
records flagged as having contradictory data.
One approach would be to start with fiction feature films, which would
probably a good-sized project because it's big enough to be interesting,
but not so huge as to be overwhelming, and would provide better access
to many popular materials through more consistent and
computer-interpretable coding of characteristics such as original
release date, original language, and genre. However, all types of moving
image materials would benefit from at least a basic work-level record.
In the long run, it would also be helpful to enhance our current
manifestation-level records with better encoding of distinguishing
features.
In addition to what kind of data is useful and practical, there are also
many technical and economic questions to be answered about how something
like this might work.
Received on Thu Jan 03 2008 - 16:14:05 EST