Heidrun - You may have seen some of my presentations about FRBR that explain this "point of view" approach to show that the theoretical, conceptual model is indeed describing what we already have as entities since the beginning of catalogs and bibliographic information (e.g., in the British Museum printed book catalog, in LC's OPAC, in linked data environments, etc.).
As for your alternative: 1. Naming the parts - by having the relationship/link to the whole, you alleviate the necessity of having to provide a "title" for the parts that includes the title of the whole. There may continue to be a need for a default display form to name the work, but I hope we can eventually get away from the need for a "heading" or "authorized access point" (other than a default used for displays), so the display context could govern what additions are needed for naming an entity. Of course, if the title of the part coincidentally does include the title of the whole, then that should be given as found. For display purposes both titles (whole and part) can be displayed when needed depending on the context. 2. Yes, and FRBR already provides for the whole/part relationships and the inherent relationships as you describe. - Barbara Tillett -----Original Message----- From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [mailto:RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA] On Behalf Of Heidrun Wiesenmüller Sent: Monday, January 09, 2012 5:37 AM To: RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Some comments on the Final Report of the FRBR Working Group on Aggregates Bernhard Eversberg wrote: > > You may contemplate any number of models that go beyond this, as this > thread amply testifies, but I seriously doubt any such approach will > be an economic use of resources. Economy dictates that we use what we > have more extensively and in better ways. > Sure, it is nice to have a complete theory, as it is fine to have a > Theory of Everything for the elementary particles, but that's largely > for the textbooks! I think Bernhard is absolutely right in stressing that a whole lot of information is already there and should be made better use of (actually that has been one of my own mantras for some years now). But I still believe it would be more than just "nice" to have a sound underlying theoretical framework. This may, of course, only be due to my being a lecturer and therefore a potential writer of textbooks... In my dreams the theoretical framework would not be some highbrow model, completely separate from real life cataloging, but rather something that would really help with cataloging, give us ideas as how to present our existing data, open up new ways of using them, and giving hints to possible improvements and further developments. Indeed quite often we may find that something which looks "new" and frighteningly difficult in the theoretical model may turn out to be something for which a real life equivalent is already there in actual cataloging. So it may often turn out that people are, in fact, familiar with it already, but just haven't thought of it in that way. But making us aware of that would (or at least, could) be more than simple giving a modern and technical sounding name to something well-known. It might make us view it in a new, wider context. I'm not sure whether I managed to make myself clear... For those of you, who are still following the details of modeling aggregates: I've done some more thinking on my "alternative model" and now propose two small additions to it. 1. The title of the "part works" should be different from the title of the corresponding individual work, and include the title of the aggregate work. E.g. the title of a "part work" could be something like "Pride and prejudice (Best loved novels)". This would make it possible to distinguish easily both between the individual work and the corresponding "part work" and also between several "part works" corresponding to the same individual work, but belonging to different aggregate works. 2. There should be a relationship between an individual work and its corresponding "part work". For want of a better name let's call it an "individual/aggregate relationship" (the definition would roughly be: the relationship between an individual work and the corresponding work as part of an aggregate work). This would make it possible to start with the aggregate work, go to one of its parts and, from there, directly to the corresponding individual work, which has links to _all_ expressions (whereas the "part work" only has links to the expressions really used in the aggregate work). Heidrun -- --------------------- Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A. Stuttgart Media University Faculty of Information and Communication Wolframstrasse 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
