I'm not actually sure that the need to distinguish between expressions
is that important -- outside of particular minority cases involving
voluminous works with many editions that are the subject of study by
literary scholars. I'm not saying it's useless, but I'm dubious that
it's as important as some people are suggesting.
(I'm not saying it's wrong to include it on our entity model! I think
it's exactly right to; I just am not convinced it's a high priority for
improving amongst all the things that need improvement).
Certainly compared to just being able to collocate works, and present a
search results where manifestations of the same work are grouped
together under one entry -- that's something most of our systems still
can't do, and I think a LOT higher priority.
Once you've collocated by work, simply displaying a list of items under
that work grouped by _format_ is probably more useful than by expression
(the majority of works will only have one expression, but many of these
will still have multiple formats; print, audiobook, online, etc.) This
is something different than grouping by expression, and is STILL
something that many of our systems can't do well -- in _part_ (although
not entirely the fault of) our metadata which makes it very hard to
determine format in a consistent way (the RDA 3xx fields _might_ help,
although they have some severe flaws when encoded in MARC that we've
discusssed before).
On 10/18/2012 1:03 AM, Peter Schouten wrote:
VIAF already contains records for Works and Expressions. Search for
Nachtmusik for some examples. A catalog with entries for Works and
Expressions is feasible and would remove the need for computers to comb
through data. The research by OCLC proved that based on current records,
computers are not able to distinguish between Expressions, which is the
biggest added value to Identify and Select.
Peter Schouten
Ingressus The Netherlands
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Van:* Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access
[[email protected]] namens Lisa McColl
[[email protected]]
*Verzonden:* woensdag 17 oktober 2012 23:58
*Aan:* [email protected]
*Onderwerp:* [RDA-L] RDA promoting the "work" entity?
I just attended an introductory webinar about RDA given by Chris Oliver.
I'm wondering what changes RDA has that will help promote the
collocation of the work entity. Is there an eye towards a web based
authority file like VIAF, but for works, that can be integrated with our
records? When Ms. Oliver spoke about particulars of the title statement
being left to cataloger judgement, it seemed to me a move away from the
uniformity that will be needed for computers to be able to compile and
comb our data and group works.
Thank you,
Lisa
