Quoting Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> So there's no way to "call an aggregate a Work/Expression" _instead of_
> a manifestation, if that aggregate is an actual physical item in your
> hand.
No, no one said "instead of". What the RDA folks (that is, the folks
who have created RDA, the JSC members) said (some of them off-list to
me), is that if your manifestation is an aggregate, then your
Expression must be an equal aggregate. So the Expression is pretty
much one-to-one with the Manifestation. (And I think we were all
seeing a many-to-many.)
This is what I was told (off-list):
"the additional
bibliographies or other intellectual or artistic content are viewed
as parts of a new expression - not just new pieces for the
manifestation ... - it's useful to declare expression level changes to
facilitate collocation and make distinctions, but sometimes such
distinctions aren't necessary and we can collocate at the work
level. Please don't start people getting confused with throwing in
expression level elements at the manifestation level."
So those were my marching orders! (And I don't see how anyone could be
more confused than I am.) But a reprint of Moby Dick with a new
preface or bibliography becomes a new expression. In crude MARC terms,
every time the 245 $c changes, you've got a new expression, unless you
determine that it's something really insignificant. And I would guess
that you can link the Expression to one or more Works, as you wish,
except that the FRBR diagram shows that expressions can only relate to
one Work. (See, no one could be more confused than I am!)
kc
> If people on the RDA-L list came to a "consensus" that is
> otherwise... I suspect you misunderstood them, but otherwise their
> consensus does not match any interpretation of FRBR I have previously
> encountered, or any that makes sense to me.
>
> You've got a manifestation whether you like it or not. The question
> is how much "authority work" are you going to do on identifying the
> Expression and Work it belongs to. If you don't do much because it
> doesn't make sense for you to do so, maybe it starts out modelled as a
> manifestation just belonging to a "dummy" Expression/Work that contains
> only that Manifestation. Some other cataloger somewhere else does the
> "authority" work to flesh out an Expression and/or Work that maybe
> contains multiple manifestations or maybe doesn't. Is your data
> incompatible? Not really, it can be merged simply by recognizing that
> your "dummy" Expression/Work can be merged into their more fleshed out
> one.
>
> There's also a question of how much "authority work" you want to do on
> the _contents_ of the aggregate. Maybe you don't want to spend any time
> on that "analytical" task at all, and your record does not reveal that
> the item in your hand IS an aggregate, it does not actually expose
> relationships to the other Works/Expressions contained within. It might
> have a transcribed table of contents as an attribute only, not as a
> relationship to other entities. Later some other cataloger fleshes
> that out. Here too, that other catalogers extra work can be
> (conceptually at least) easily "merged in" to your record, there is no
> incompatibility.
>
> [If two different catalogers/communities decide that two different
> Works contain _different_ manifestations, and violently disagree, then
> THAT's an incompatibility that's harder to resolve and is a legitimate
> concern. But that's not what we have in this example, which is quite
> straightforward.]
>
> While to some extent I sympathize with your inchoate thoughts about
> modelling WEMI being a mistake, and we've talked about that before --
> ultimately I still disagree. It is appropriate to use an
> entity-relation-attribute model to come up with the kind of explicit
> and formal model of our data that we both agree we need. It's a
> conventional, mature, and well-tested modelling approach (I wouldn't
> want to pin all our eggs to RDF experimentation that at least arguably
> does not rely on an entity model). You can't have an entity model
> without entities. The FRBR WMI (and more debatably E) entities are
> the ones that clearly come out of a formalization of our 100 year
> tradition of cataloging, meaning there's probably something to them AND
> that using them makes retroactively applying the model to our 100 years
> worth of legacy data is more feasible (and BOTH of those facts are
> totally legitimate grounds for decision making. And the decision has
> already been made too, although in the case of FRAD I'd still be
> reluctant to accept it as a "done deal", but in the case of FRBR, it is
> much better done, a much more useful and accurate abstraction of our
> cataloging tradition). Should we take this back to RDA-L (where I'll
> probably begin paying only intermittent attention to it again; for my
> purposes/interests, there is a lot of 'noise' on RDA-L).
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>
>> I've had this ill-formed notion for a while that we shouldn't
>> actually be creating WEMI as "things" -- that to do so locks us
>> into a record model and we get right back into some of the
>> problems that we have today in terms of exchanging records with
>> anyone who doesn't do things exactly our way. WEMI to me should be
>> relationships, not structures. If one community wants to gather
>> them together for a particular display, that shouldn't require
>> that their data only express that structure. I'm not sure FRBR
>> supports this.
>>
>> sound vague? it is -- I wish I could provide something more
>> concrete, but that's what I'm struggling with.
>>
>> kc
>>
>>
>>> This seems a pretty convincing argument to me?
>>>
>>> But it's not unique to musical recordings. If I have the Collected
>>> Works of Mark Twain, which includes the complete Tom Sawyer... how can
>>> Tom Sawyer not be a work? And how can the Tom Sawyer that's in the
>>> Collected Works NOT be the same work as the Tom Sawyer that's published
>>> seperately?
>>>
>>> If that was "the conclusion on the RDA-L list", it makes no sense to me.
>>>
>>> Jonathan
>>>
>>
>>
--
Karen Coyle
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ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
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