A few thoughts of my own concerning this issue:
First, I suspect this issue is of relatively little interest or use to
the public, so this is probably more related to internal management of
the collection. Cutter implies as much in the Appendix to his Rules
http://www.archive.org/details/publiclibraries00cuttgoog (p. 81), where
he discusses tools needed only for the librarians to manage the
collections. He mentions the "Tract-catalogue", which is "a list of the
tracts contained in bound volumes", or in our terminology, aggregates.
He goes on to say, "You may see collections of pamphlets on various
subjects by various authors recorded under a made-up heading "Tracts" or
"Pamphlets," a style of entry that is nearly useless. The whole of the
Prince catalogue of 1846 was made in this absurd way." [Incidentally, I
guess he means the "Catalogue of the library of Rev. Thomas Prince",
which is indeed a strange one, providing a bizarre listing of the books
by size, without any discernible order at all. Completely useless. An
example of what Cutter mentions is found on no. 856, p. 58 "Tracts"
http://books.google.com/books?id=mjQAAAAAYAAJ. I just can't hold myself
back from sharing these things! I can't get over that I can do all of
this online, and for free!]
Probably, the issue of aggregates is also more related to physical
materials than to virtual resources. Since each library has been dealing
with these matters for a long, long time, each will have its own
methods. Now that FRBR mandates that everything we catalog must have
separate work and expression entities (something that cannot be
questioned), we see another example where the workload and complexity
goes up while access stays the same.
I also wonder how individual journal articles play into this model.
The Working Group report at least mentions mashups but doesn't really
discuss them. I don't blame them one bit since working mashups into the
WEMI model will probably make dealing with aggregates in the printed
world look like child's play.
--
*James Weinheimer* weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
*First Thus* http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
*Cooperative Cataloging Rules*
http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
