Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
I'd like to point those of you interested in the more technical side of
discussions on RDA and FRBR to a conversation going on in the public
Linked Library Data discussion list, starting here with a message from
Karen Coyle:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/2010Sep/0049.html
In one of the responses to that post is a link to a blog post by Brad
Allen about "Faceted classification and FRBR"
(http://bpa.tumblr.com/post/10814190/faceted-classification-and-frbr).
... His post is well worth
reading.
Indeed it is. Read that, everybody!
Being a mathematician, the set-theoretic view (based on
Elaine Svenonius) appeals to me a great deal. Allen's (Svenonius')
reasoning is very sound, and down to earth when considering our
biggest predicament, our legacy data. It also goes well with the
paradigm of all known retrieval systems, based as it is on the idea of
the "result set", resulting from a query that uses attributes of various
kinds, and all of them can be viewed as attributes of items. Certain
combinations of attributes define subsets of items - some of these
subsets can be called "manifestations", "expressions", or "works".
The identification of the work, however, remains the open question.
It has to be done somewhere. Traditionally, it was pinned down by the
"uniform title", and many of our records have this as a distinctive
attribute. Add to it the language, date, form, medium, numeric
designation, key, coordinates, etc. - and you single out the
crucial subsets that FRBR views from the top down.
Certainly, FRBR's entity-relationship paradigm won't get entirely
lost if we pursue this approach. It remains useful as a kind of
"Weltanschauung", but the set-theoretic paradigm is, I think,
more helpful as well as more versatile. It avoids the difficulties
with the blurred boundaries of the FRBR entities as we encounter
them in practice. The set-theoretic view can effortlessly describe
many more entities, all of them subsets of items sharing certain
common attributes (or "facets", in Allen's terms).
And anyway, Brad's basic point of tying the process of cataloging to the
item, as we always did, is perhaps the only realistic one under the
circumstances given. Perhaps it will remain more pragmatic to use
the item level concept only within the ILS (where it is needed for
circulation) and retain the level just above it, presently called
"manifestation", as the focus of attention in cataloging and the
creation of records (as long as this concept is still necessary and
useful.)
What does it all mean, in practice?
It is not a new idea: Extend the "uniform title" element
by a few subelements (see above), and we're done. It may then
be useful to build a better uniform title authority data pool,
ideally an extension of the VIAF pool, but much of the data is already
there, somewhere. And not every item, as Mac always insists, is actually
in need of this much attention.
B.Eversberg
