David Weinberger
Here are three things from David Weinberger to check out, and one from Lorcan Dempsey, sorted for your convenience:
- Me in the [Boston] Globe about Google Print and book metadata
- Crunching the Metadata: What Google Print Really Tells Us About the Future of Books (Boston Globe, 13 November 2005; no registration required, may disappear soon)
- Two points that didn’t fit into the Globe
- FRBR Fervor (by Dempsey)
In the Boston Globe piece, Weinberger says:
First, we’ll need what are known as unique identifiers—such as the call letters stamped on the spines of library books. Unfortunately, any system that assigns numbers to books based on what they’re about is going to suffer from Dewey’s weakness. Both Google Print and Amazon use the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN. Created in the 1960s, the ISBN is a good starting point; still, it may not be the ultimate solution. Only books published since the ’60s have them, for one thing, and while a real-world library has to deal with each book as an inviolable whole—just try checking out a single chapter of a book—in the near future we’ll need identifiers for individual chapters, paragraphs, even illustrations. ISBNs only identify the book as a whole.
In his follow-up blog entry he adds what the editor cut:
First, books are way complex. What is Hamlet? Any book of the play? The Signet edition? A reprint of the Signet edition? The Signet edition with a new preface? With errata corrected? The Signet large print edition? The German translation? The original manuscript? Hamlet in the one-volume Collected Works? This matters because when you’re looking for a copy of Hamlet, you’re acting as if that were unambiguous when in fact there are various forms of the book that will or will not satisfy you. This is the type of complexity that drives people to create ontologies. Short of that, xISBN tries to cluster books in reasonable ways. . And there’s a standard (I can’t lay my hands on it now — FRBR? — I’m slightly on the road) that lays out the various levels of abstraction.
So, universal authority records and unique identifiers for all works. He’s certainly right about the complexity of books, and FRBR is exactly the way libraries are working to make it simpler. Dempsey comments:
Not only is there a granularity issue, there is an abstraction one which comes back to the question about what is a book? The ISBN, for example, is typically applied at the manifestation level (in FRBR terms). Do we need an identifier for works? What resolution and registration services would be useful so as to be able to tie together identifiers for the multiplying versions (think of the various digitization initiatives).