Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA
Dan Matei wrote: -Original Message- From: Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu To: RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:31:32 -0400 Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA Yes, it's an arbitrary judgement. They are ALL arbitrary judgements, either way. I would prefer to call them cultural conventions. IMHO, they are not completely arbitrary: they are based on the evaluation of the amount of added creativity. But I think this misses the point: does WEMI define the universe of information, *and* define what people want when they search information? From my understanding of FRBR/RDA, everything must be boiled down to WEMI. Certainly if I have a book by one author and they make a movie out of it, that may be one thing, but there are almost infinite possibilities today. What if I have a single document in XML that outputs MSWord, pdf, HTML, text, djvu and so on? Each output has different page numbers and can look completely differently, but they are all have exactly the same information. Many newspapers are produced this way so that they don't have to make separate paper versions and an online version. Even among these different versions, there may be specific outputs for a different screen sizes, for different browsers, or on a specific mobile phone (becoming more popular) and now probably with different ebook readers. Remember, these versions are derived from one, single file, and most of these versions are only virtual i.e. while they can be printed, they won't be. Add to this a mashup of bits and pieces of separate items of information from different websites using APIs, each of which may have gone through a similar transformation as mentioned above. It seems to me that trying to relate this to WEMI is literally mind-blowing and an exercise in futility. I see our task as trying to give access to this information in the most coherent way for our users. Is seeing everything through WEMI-colored lenses the only way, the best way, or even a correct way, of doing it? Jim Weinheimer
Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA
Bernhard Eversberg wrote: Weinheimer Jim wrote: But I think this misses the point: does WEMI define the universe of information, *and* define what people want when they search information? From my understanding of FRBR/RDA, everything must be boiled down to WEMI. It's the classical mental image for the structure of published resources. It emerged at a time when there was no dynamism and interactivity in publishing but only static, physical items one could relate to each other in defined ways. Yes; even so, I remain unconvinced that the containing work (a monograph collection of contributions, like that favorite academic creation, the festschrift; or, above all, a serial publication containing articles) is really the same kind of beast as a work in the sense of a person's writing, or a picture -- I suspect the analogies are weak, and appear tolerable only because in the past we've used similar devices do deal with them, basically ignoring the constituent works which they contain. Consolidation of like attributes is one thing; reductionism (which involves ignoring of significant differences because they don't seem to fit your narrowly-focussed purpose right now, and can therefore be plausibly but inaccurately said not to matter) is quite another, and undermines our efforts. I see our task as trying to give access to this information in the most coherent way for our users. Is seeing everything through WEMI-colored lenses the only way, the best way, or even a correct way, of doing it? Not in my view -- WEMI is only properly applicable to essentially coherent documents. Besides, FRBR/WEMI/FRAD show no signs of being applied to make the kind of links which, in principle, could be created. I think I've quoted before one of my own fields of interest: spiritual writings used by Elizabethan Catholics. In this cluster of documents Jesuits authors, editors and publishers are a significant group of contributors. But no mechanism, present or proposed (except my own endeavours, for myself), enables me to apply a search criterion to discovering or organizing the resources, namely what documents have a Jesuit connection? And if you're going to move outside the document field -- resources which have a degree of fixity -- I really don't understand how you can operate in combination with documentary resource systems. Hal Cain Dalton McCaughey Library Parkville, Victoria, Australia h...@dml.vic.edu.au This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA
Weinheimer Jim wrote: But I think this misses the point: does WEMI define the universe of information, *and* define what people want when they search information? From my understanding of FRBR/RDA, everything must be boiled down to WEMI. I do not agree with this understanding. WEMI describes how it's suggested we divide our conceptual _entities_, whether actually divided into seperate records per-entity (ideal in my opinion), or just divided into intellectual components that might be combined in a record (also possible). But everything is NOT boiled down to WEMI. Many other relationships between WEMI entities are possible. The FRBR report itself says this, although does not definitively describe a vocabularly of possible relationships, leaving that to a later date and/or to individual communities. RDA may make a contribution here, I'm not really sure, finding RDA somewhat impenetrable. It is a misconception that everything must boil down to WEMI and we can record no other relationships that are not in WEMI. Jonathan
Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA
Jonathan Rochkind wrote: But everything is NOT boiled down to WEMI. Many other relationships between WEMI entities are possible. The FRBR report itself says this, although does not definitively describe a vocabularly of possible relationships, leaving that to a later date and/or to individual communities. RDA may make a contribution here, I'm not really sure, finding RDA somewhat impenetrable. It is a misconception that everything must boil down to WEMI and we can record no other relationships that are not in WEMI. Perhaps I am completely off base, but I do not believe I am talking about relationships here, I am talking about some new types of entities that do not seem to fit the WEMI theoretical framework. These new things I discussed do not seem to me to fit in very comfortably to work, expression, manifestation, or item. They seem to be completely different animals. I guess I see it as similar to the introduction of printing, which brought in some brand new concepts, such as exact duplicate. With hand-made text, such a thing as an exact duplicate never existed before, and before printing, collectors went to great lengths to get as many copies of a text as possible so that all could be collated and compared. But with printing, there were suddenly exact duplicates. (I actually did a bit of research on this at one point and, so far as I found, the first time this was mentioned was by Thomas Bodley, who complained that his librarian was spending his money, buying lots of texts he already had. The librarian was doing the same thing that he had always done, but technology caught up with him, even though if memory serves, this happened in the early 1500s. Please, anybody feel free to correct me!) I think we are entering a similar time with new things popping up. These new things could not have been foreseen during the development of FRBR,in the 1990s, but they are everywhere now and wildly popular. Certainly we can shoe horn everything together and make things fit, but I don't know if that would be correct or wise. Naturally, I could be wrong in this and WEMI is forever and immutable, but I think that at least the issue itself is debatable. Jim Weinheimer
Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA
In article 2mp8jfj3be8t09...@slc.bc.ca, I wrote:
BTW the term for super-work is urberwerk (which can also mean an
organ swell, and is a popular binocular).
Sorry. the organ swell is oberwerk.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__
[RDA-L] Michael Hafner ist außer Haus / Michael Hafner is out of office
Ich werde ab 24.04.2009 nicht im Büro sein. Ich kehre zurück am 04.05.2009. In dringenden Fällen wenden Sie sich bitte an die stellvertretende Leiterin der Abteilung ABD, Frau Uta Hardes-Schmeißer (Tel. 0228-429.4323; uta.hardes-schmeis...@dw-world.de) I will return to office on May 4th. Mail to michael.haf...@dw-world.de will not be forwarded. Mail to leitung@dw-world.de will reach me as well as ABD's Vice Head of Department, Mrs. Uta Hardes-Schmeißer (Phone +49.228-429.4323).
Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA
From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access on behalf of Weinheimer Jim Perhaps I am completely off base, but I do not believe I am talking about relationships here, I am talking about some new types of entities that do not seem to fit the WEMI theoretical framework. These new things I discussed do not seem to me to fit in very comfortably to work, expression, manifestation, or item. They seem to be completely different animals. -- Do these new things/entities have a name? Do they have a definition? Is there any relationship between them and the model under discussion? To previous cataloging theories? That is, where do they fit into the structures we are used to? Or are they entirely incompatible with previous thinking? Do we need to replace bibliocentric thinking with datum-centric thinking (like geocentrism was replaced by heliocentrism)? Or can the approaches live side-by-side to address different levels of granularity at which users can operate (like quantum and Newtonian mechanics for sub-atomic and super-atomic interactions)? I can see from James and others' posts that something interesting is going on with full-text, digital access and the use of search engines. I can also see that others have something interesting to describe concerning the semantic web. I get glimmers that RDA seems to be leveraging FRBR to tap into the latter (setting aside concerns over the possible success or failure of that endeavor). But I do not see what proponents of the former would like to accomplish, what their plan is to accomplish it, what libraries' place will be in it, and by extension what the role of the cataloging community will be. I get the point that hand-crafted metadata is not sustainable in a digital environment. (Not happy, but get it.) FRBR/RDA seem to offer the hope of guiding the evolution/development of machine-assisted metadata. The full-text rules/datum snippet/mash-up approach seems only to offer oblivion. John Myers, Catalog Librarian Schaffer Library, Union College Schenectady NY 12308 mye...@union.edu 518-388-6623
Re: [RDA-L] Utility of FRBR/WEMI/RDA
Weinheimer Jim wrote: But I think this misses the point: does WEMI define the universe of information, *and* define what people want when they search information? From my understanding of FRBR/RDA, everything must be boiled down to WEMI. It's the classical mental image for the structure of published resources. It emerged at a time when there was no dynamism and interactivity in publishing but only static, physical items one could relate to each other in defined ways. I see our task as trying to give access to this information in the most coherent way for our users. Is seeing everything through WEMI-colored lenses the only way, the best way, or even a correct way, of doing it? We may look at LT as a kind of lab where new things are tried out, and done by people who are mostly not trained librarians, or at least not sworn in to AACR and LCSH. What's the stuff that emerges out of there? Some of it are re-inventions of what we've long since had, but with new twists. Look at what sort of links they create between resources, or works and manifestations, or between persons and their works, and what uses are being made of it all. And that whole tagging business is certainly not just a crude re-creation of subject headings, it goes beyond what we'd call subjects. People put in attributes there they'd actually like to be able to find in searches, so look closer at those attributes: what's there that we don't have in catalogs? But then, of course, full-text search and ToC vocabulary may well be much more useful already than all that WEMI can possibly achieve, esp. if we consider that WEMI can help in relatively few cases only, the amount and importance of which we have no clear assessment of. And that means we have to include outside search systems into our catalog concepts. What people find in LT, in GBS, in Amazon, in Wikipedia, to name a few, must be translatable into a meaningful search in their local catalogs or WorldCat, for they don't start their searches and they don't find what they want in libraries today, or maybe 1 in 100 cases, not more. Catalog access must get in there for they are the only gateways into library-held resources. Things to this effect have been said many times but are not addressed at all by RDA. B.Eversberg
