Bigwood and Weinberger
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned David Weinberger’s article in the Boston Globe. David Bigwood, who writes Catalogablog (a blog worth following), also commented on it, and on Friday he quoted a response from Bigwood, and in turn responded to that. Here’s where he mentions FRBR:
A greater problem is what do the identifiers identify. If I’m looking for Hamlet do I want a particular format, or edition? Would a book on CD do or a lager print, or a film do, or do I require the Everyman’s edition with a particular introduction? ISBNs are acceptable for identifying a particular manifestation. Searching for a expression or all manifestations of a work is a problem. OCLC has the xISBN service that collects all other ISBNs for a work and allows searching by all of them. That helps somewhat, it is not a good long-term solution. Librarians are working on an identifier for works. Parts of a work will also need to have identifiers, maybe standard citations would work. The OpenURL is a possible solution since it uses citation data. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) will be useful in pulling together all the different manifestations of a work and differentiating among them.