Bernhard Eversberg wrote: <snip> Schutt, Misha wrote: > > The moral of this story, I guess, is that two works may be separated by > multiple layers of derivativeness. > True. Traditionally, we didn't give much attention to the closeness or the nature of a relationship between works. If at all, one added a uniform title and a little, rather informal note and that was it - let the user figure out the usefulness of that. RDA, however, asks for a more detailed inspection because it is a cornerstone of the FRBR model that related works, expressions and manifestations be made transparent and meaningfully presented in a catalog to assist the users in their arduous tasks of finding and selecting the right thing. And this will mean a bit more work, sometimes bordering on literary criticism, delving much deeper into the content than cataloging rules used to require. </snip>
This is correct, but the amount of additional work remains to be seen, along with questions of maintaining consistency. I suspect training people to reach these levels will be exceptionally difficult based on my own experience of many of the catalog records produced today, where I have seen very little consistency in the use of 6xx$v (which can become very confusing) and with subject analysis in general. If this is the case now, how can we attempt to teach catalogers to achieve a decent level of consistent analysis in, e.g. isAdaptationOf or isTransformationOf or isImitationOf? This will be genuinely new and is probably more confusing than the $v. I am sure that the FRBR relationships are not exhaustive, and there will be campaigns for additional relationships such as isIllogicalConclusionOf or isBadJokeOf or isPlagiarismOf! :-) Again, I think it all comes down to what users need (i.e. the user tasks) and being realistic in what we can achieve. The library community must decide the best ways to allot their resources, and while explicating such relationships may be a nice thing to do and marginally useful for some of our patrons, is it what people want and is it the best use of our resources? (Obviously, I don't think so) Do people just want more reliable access to materials that have been selected by some disinterested experts? Certainly when someone is looking at one resource or metadata for that resource, they need to be aware of other resources in various other ways. But there are many ways to do this task using more informal (i.e. traditional) methods. We should also not forget the Web2.0 possibilities, which may go a long way toward linking records and resources. James Weinheimer j.weinhei...@aur.edu Director of Library and Information Services The American University of Rome via Pietro Roselli, 4 00153 Rome, Italy voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258 fax-011 39 06 58330992
