On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:35:49 -0400, McGrath, Kelley C. <kmcgrath_at_BSU.EDU> wrote:
>It seems to me that Work records will only really be useful if they are a
public good and available to everyone. Although Works don't really have
inherent identifiers, theoretically, Work records could more easily have
identifiers in the way that authority records do now. It may be that
different groups will create different Work records which may have to be
linked in some way, as the VIAF tries to do now for names. It may also be
that people modify them for local versions, but they would presumably still
link back to the public master identifier. More problematically, different
groups may use different Work boundaries (when is something a new Work?),
but possibly with more sophisticated linking, this could be handled. It
won't be perfect (as authority records aren't now), but is hard to see how
Work records would be truly effective on a large scale otherwise.
This is yet another of the problems I have with FRBR. There have been many
related projects that did not exist in mid-1990s and some going on now;
also, we need to shed our traditional view of the library world as being
separate and isolated, and rather we should strive to fit in to the larger
information universe. It won't be easy, but absolutely necessary. Otherwise,
everyone will be on the old treadmill, redoing the same work over and over
because "ours is better."
There is the International Standard Text Code at
http://www.istc-international.org/index.php?ci_id=1817
It is an ISO standard (ISO 21047). From its description, I think it is
trying to identify expressions, but I'm not sure.
e.g.
"Each ISTC is a unique “number” assigned by a centralised registration
system to a textual work, when a unique set of information about that work,
known as a “metadata record”, is entered into the system. If another,
identical metadata record has already been registered (perhaps, in the case
of an out of copyright work, by another publisher), the system will assume
the new ISTC request refers to the same work and will output the ISTC of the
identical (or nearly identical) metadata record already held on the system."
and
"For many reasons, most textual content is made available in more than one
format or edition, and often by more than one publisher. While for many
years the ISBN has made it easy to distinguish these different products, now
the ISTC makes it possible to group these products containing the same
content, or even in some cases, different content with the same origins,
together. This makes it possible to..."
The terms work, edition, products etc. are difficult for me to understand.
Still, ISTC apparently is trying to go beyond publisher, year of
publication, etc. and includes what we would call variant editions (is it a
work or expression?), which is quite different from our present practices
and FRBR (i.e. our practices in the future)+. In their manual, they mention
FRBR only once, and that is to state that they differ from FRBR in defining
works
[See:
http://www.istc-international.org/multimedia/pdfs/ISTC_User_Manual_2009v1.0.pdf#page=17.
p. 17)
I haven't spent much time with this, so I don't know what I think of it. It
has no example records that I have found, which is how I begin to understand
something. Still, it seems as if this major effort--and an ISO standard,
after all--should be incorporated by libraries somehow since it could be
incredibly useful.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Oct 27 2009 - 04:40:34 EDT