LibraryThing gets works
Nichole _____ left a comment pointing out an entry she made on her blog: FRBR Comes to LibraryThing?! In it she comments on some work going on at Library Thing, explained here by Tim Spalding: Work Disambiguation and the "Ship of Theseus".
The former system was essentially composed of discrete books. If two books had very similar authors and titles (eg., two editions of Romeo and Juliet) , the system guessed that they were the same “work.” These guesses were pretty good—particularly considering they had to be made on the fly—but not good enough. And there was no way to change them. Notably, the whole system operated without a separate “works” database. This was clever and economical, but also limited.
The new system introduces a robust concept of “work.” On the database side this means a special “works” database, where each work has a title (the most common title of books belonging to the work). It is the way whereby most LibraryThing books can acquire LCCNs, Deweys and other cataloging information. It will allow users to discuss books—for example, on a forum—without worrying that they were only talking to people who had the same edition they did. Techies will like that it opens the door to an external API, relying on Library of Congress data, not Amazon data, which is forbidden. And, most importantly, it will allow ordinary people to participate in the sacred act of cataloging, combining and splitting books from works as they see fit. This has never before been done before. It’s Wikipedia for book cataloging.
There’s no mention of FRBR, and I’m going to e-mail Spalding to ask if he’s going to use it. I’m eager to see this at work and find out more about how he’s designed it.
(This may remind you of an aside made at an Access 2005 talk last year, too.)