The publishing community have always modelled the world differently than
we do. For instance, I think the thing that they assign an ISBN to is
most analagous to our manifestation, but we consider hardcover and
paperback to be the same manifestation, and they consider it to be
different manifestations, in the sense that they get different ISBNs.
I _think_ the thing they are modelling with ISTC is most analagous to
our work rather than our expression, but they may (likely) define that
thing (which we call work) differently than we do. Or maybe James is
right and it's most analagous to our expression. It is confusing.
You know what would make it a lot less confusing? If they actually had
an explicit and formalized domain model that they were using, that we
could look at, and see how it maps to what we do.
This is in fact a _great_ example of why it's so important for US to
have an explicit and formalized domain model, and I still say that
starting with the FRBR model (and then modifying it as needed, with that
need discovered through actual practice) is the best option we've got
for that.
Jonathan
James Weinheimer wrote:
> 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 - 12:18:56 EDT