Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <[email protected]>:
So there's no way to "call an aggregate a Work/Expression" _instead of_
a manifestation, if that aggregate is an actual physical item in your
hand.
No, no one said "instead of". What the RDA folks (that is, the folks
who have created RDA, the JSC members) said (some of them off-list to
me), is that if your manifestation is an aggregate, then your
Expression must be an equal aggregate. So the Expression is pretty
much one-to-one with the Manifestation. (And I think we were all
seeing a many-to-many.)
This is what I was told (off-list):
"the additional
bibliographies or other intellectual or artistic content are viewed
as parts of a new expression - not just new pieces for the
manifestation ... - it's useful to declare expression level changes to
facilitate collocation and make distinctions, but sometimes such
distinctions aren't necessary and we can collocate at the work
level. Please don't start people getting confused with throwing in
expression level elements at the manifestation level."
So those were my marching orders! (And I don't see how anyone could be
more confused than I am.) But a reprint of Moby Dick with a new
preface or bibliography becomes a new expression. In crude MARC terms,
every time the 245 $c changes, you've got a new expression, unless you
determine that it's something really insignificant. And I would guess
that you can link the Expression to one or more Works, as you wish,
except that the FRBR diagram shows that expressions can only relate to
one Work. (See, no one could be more confused than I am!)
kc
If people on the RDA-L list came to a "consensus" that is
otherwise... I suspect you misunderstood them, but otherwise their
consensus does not match any interpretation of FRBR I have previously
encountered, or any that makes sense to me.
You've got a manifestation whether you like it or not. The question
is how much "authority work" are you going to do on identifying the
Expression and Work it belongs to. If you don't do much because it
doesn't make sense for you to do so, maybe it starts out modelled as a
manifestation just belonging to a "dummy" Expression/Work that contains
only that Manifestation. Some other cataloger somewhere else does the
"authority" work to flesh out an Expression and/or Work that maybe
contains multiple manifestations or maybe doesn't. Is your data
incompatible? Not really, it can be merged simply by recognizing that
your "dummy" Expression/Work can be merged into their more fleshed out
one.
There's also a question of how much "authority work" you want to do on
the _contents_ of the aggregate. Maybe you don't want to spend any time
on that "analytical" task at all, and your record does not reveal that
the item in your hand IS an aggregate, it does not actually expose
relationships to the other Works/Expressions contained within. It might
have a transcribed table of contents as an attribute only, not as a
relationship to other entities. Later some other cataloger fleshes
that out. Here too, that other catalogers extra work can be
(conceptually at least) easily "merged in" to your record, there is no
incompatibility.
[If two different catalogers/communities decide that two different
Works contain _different_ manifestations, and violently disagree, then
THAT's an incompatibility that's harder to resolve and is a legitimate
concern. But that's not what we have in this example, which is quite
straightforward.]
While to some extent I sympathize with your inchoate thoughts about
modelling WEMI being a mistake, and we've talked about that before --
ultimately I still disagree. It is appropriate to use an
entity-relation-attribute model to come up with the kind of explicit
and formal model of our data that we both agree we need. It's a
conventional, mature, and well-tested modelling approach (I wouldn't
want to pin all our eggs to RDF experimentation that at least arguably
does not rely on an entity model). You can't have an entity model
without entities. The FRBR WMI (and more debatably E) entities are
the ones that clearly come out of a formalization of our 100 year
tradition of cataloging, meaning there's probably something to them AND
that using them makes retroactively applying the model to our 100 years
worth of legacy data is more feasible (and BOTH of those facts are
totally legitimate grounds for decision making. And the decision has
already been made too, although in the case of FRAD I'd still be
reluctant to accept it as a "done deal", but in the case of FRBR, it is
much better done, a much more useful and accurate abstraction of our
cataloging tradition). Should we take this back to RDA-L (where I'll
probably begin paying only intermittent attention to it again; for my
purposes/interests, there is a lot of 'noise' on RDA-L).
Jonathan
I've had this ill-formed notion for a while that we shouldn't
actually be creating WEMI as "things" -- that to do so locks us
into a record model and we get right back into some of the
problems that we have today in terms of exchanging records with
anyone who doesn't do things exactly our way. WEMI to me should be
relationships, not structures. If one community wants to gather
them together for a particular display, that shouldn't require
that their data only express that structure. I'm not sure FRBR
supports this.
sound vague? it is -- I wish I could provide something more
concrete, but that's what I'm struggling with.
kc
This seems a pretty convincing argument to me?
But it's not unique to musical recordings. If I have the Collected
Works of Mark Twain, which includes the complete Tom Sawyer... how can
Tom Sawyer not be a work? And how can the Tom Sawyer that's in the
Collected Works NOT be the same work as the Tom Sawyer that's published
seperately?
If that was "the conclusion on the RDA-L list", it makes no sense to me.
Jonathan
--
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
