________________________________________ From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Heidrun Wiesenmüller [[email protected]] Sent: January-08-12 9:24 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Some comments on the Final Report of the FRBR Working Group on Aggregates
>But at least, an aggregating work can have some of the >attributes which ordinary works have: certainly a title, a date, and the >"intended termination"; probably also things like intended audience and >context for the work. I'm not so sure about form of the work (the >examples in FRBR are "novel, play, poem, essay" a.s.o., which do not fit >here; but perhaps one could have "collection" as a form of work). The >aggregating work also has, of course, a relationship to its creator. So >there is some information connected with this entity which can be worth >recording. This problem also appears in the use of 655 genre/form headings. A GSAFD genre/form heading like "Short stories" (despite the plural form) is applied to an "individual work" -- in effect, a single short story. A collection of short stories would get the 650 heading, "Short stories" -- "Here are entered collections of stories" as the LC authority record emphatically indicates. There are also some existing lurking effects of aggregating expressions in RDA. The authorized access point for compilations of works are dependent on whether there is a single creator or not. If there are works by different persons, then the authorized access point is made using only the preferred title for the work (effectively the aggregating work). A compilation of works (which logically also means there's an aggregating expression) by one creator has an authorized access point that incorporates the creator's name. There is also a manifestation element, "Mode of Issuance" (RDA 2.13), that has a value "multipart monograph" for when a manifestation is issued in two or more parts (simultaneously or successively). This implies a connection to situations when there are multiple carriers (such as kits), which has its own issue for mapping to related Expression-level Content Type elements [see earlier postings on connecting Content Types to respective Carrier Types]. There are other similar issues related to accompanying material and Related Manifestations, where 300$e, repeating 300's, and 505 can be applied. The various conventions for recording the "multi-part" nature of the individual manifestations don't go much beyond structured or unstructured descriptions. One of the resulting problems is that there is a lot of lumping going in catalog records. A multipart monograph can have multiple expressions (an aggregating expression), or multiple works in the form of a compilation (which mean there's also an aggregating expression), and multiple carriers that carry different parts of the aggregating expression. One point that needs to be highlighted is that the report on aggregates specify the one unique relationship in FRBR-- the Expression-to-Manifestation relationship is the only "many-to-many" relationship in FRBR. All other relationships are "one-to-many" -- a work can have multiple expressions, but an expression can realize only one work. An expression can appear in different manifestations, but, uniquely, a manifestation can embody multiple expressions. Things get complicated with multipart monographs, which can have their own mesh of related individual manfestations, each of which can embody one of the expressions of the aggregating expression of the overall multipart monograph. Generally, explicit relationships, whether primary (vertical) or horizontal get squashed in all this, and much is left to record in notes only. Thomas Brenndorfer Guelph Public Library
