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
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