Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_JHU.EDU>:
> But what about a new edition with a new afterword, or with
> 'typesetting' errors corrected? Would that be the same ISTC or another
> one? I think we'd call it a new expression, in either case.
So here's the big difference between ISTC and "publications" -- ISTC
is NOT about an individual publication. It is about "Moby Dick" not
"the Vintage version of Moby Dick with an introduction by Professor
X". So it would identify Moby Dick in all of the places where it was
published, regardless of what publishers have wrapped around it in
order to create a new, marketable product. In that sense, it should be
very helpful to information seekers who want the text of Moby Dick but
don't care about who reset the type or added a preface.
This is an interesting problem, and one that Google must struggle with
when dealing with digitized books (as defined in the settlement). The
settlement calls all of these things that aren't the main text
"inserts" (although in some sense you could probably consider the main
text just the primary insert). What complicates things for Google is
that inserts often have a different copyright status from the main
text. So the preface by prof. X is still under copyright, but Moby
Dick is public domain. It isn't really the BOOK that has a copyright
status, but the individual works/texts inside the book. When
someone like project Gutenberg pulls Moby Dick out of a publication
and turns it into plain text, they can do that because that particular
text is in the public domain, although all of the book is not. I
presume that if I took a copy of Moby Dick to the copy center and
copied just the Herman Melville part, not anything provided by the
publisher (that is eligible for copyright protection), I'm allowed to
do that.
xISBN brings together manifestations that have the same primary text,
but those
manifestations are not equivalent from page 1 to the end. We keep
working with Books, not with Texts. In essence, everything we have in
the library is a "kit" - a multi-part thingy.
kc
>
> But you're probably right, and the implicit non-formalized entity that
> gets an ISTC assigned is most analagous to our 'expression', although
> not defined in exactly the same way we might, which is to be expected.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Karen Coyle wrote:
>> Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_JHU.EDU>:
>>
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> It IS confusing, but my understanding is the same as Jim's - ISTC
>> identifies a text qua text. Translations are considered
>> "derivations" and get a different ISTC from the original. (Whether
>> or not something hangs these together I'm not clear on at the
>> moment, but the documentation may say.) So that would make them
>> expressions. However, if we could link together a bunch of
>> expressions, then we would have a kind of de facto definition of a
>> Work, in the FrBR sense.
>>
>> kc
>>
>>
>>
>>
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Tue Oct 27 2009 - 16:05:05 EDT