Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> All of this makes sense. BUT once someone HAS established a work for
> The Conquest of Bread and filled in it's subjects, I shouldn't _have_
> to go assigning subjects every time I make a new manifestation record,
> should I? I should be able to inherit from that work, such that when
> the work subjects are changed (someoen does a better job), my
> manifestation knows that too.
Right. In the same way that when I use a name heading, if an authority
record already exists I don't need to add cross references. So there is
some inheritance here, although as Aaron Dobbs points out, if you let
people delete subject headings from Works, then you may have deleted
them for everyone else. This is one of the reasons why a strict
hierarchy doesn't work for me, because of the ripple effects. So now we
come to all of the issues of ownership and versioning, and how those get
controlled in the process. This would be an interesting scenario to work
through: how do we share in a way that we get the efficiencies but
minimize the ripple of disruption that some changes could cause? This
fits into the idea that was floating around of trying to design a system
of "distributed cataloging."
>
>
> But you've got to do all that on top of a formalized domain model.
> Having a formalized domain model is what even gives us the language to
> have this discussion. And the work you do on top of the formalized
> domain model will no doubt give you insights suggesting changes in the
> underlying formalized domain model, in an iterative process. That's
> fine. But you've got to start sometime, and you've got to have a
> formalized domain model.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that we don't need a formalized
model. I consider it a given that we do. Unfortunately, a bad model
isn't going to do us any good, and there are parts of FRBR that I have
serious doubts about. (Remember that the Future of Bibliographic Control
report said that LC should not accept RDA until we have done some
testing of FRBR -- if the underlying model is flawed, what we build on
it cannot work.) We DO need to hack away on FRBR to see if it works, but
unfortunately we cannot change it -- FRBR is fully under the control of
IFLA and IFLA does not seem to be interacting beyond the boundaries of
its committee structure in the development of the models.
I am also very concerned about some of the conclusions in FRAD, because
they seem to indicate that the committee does not understand the E-R
concept. An example of this is that FRAD has declared the name of a
person, corporate body or family (in the form of a controlled access
point) to be an entity in itself, and ditto the identifier for person,
etc. I'd love for the IFLA work to be more open -- I want to know why
they think like they do, and what their definition of an entity is, and
all kinds of other things. I'd love to be having this conversation in a
forum that would inform the FR models that IFLA is developing. Instead,
I feel like we're in a "take it or leave it" situation. And, as you can
imagine, I'm not happy about that.
kc
--
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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
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Received on Wed Oct 21 2009 - 18:35:21 EDT