LibraryThing has works
Here’s Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep at LibraryThing, a shared system for cataloguing personal libraries. All of the different editions—manifestations—entered by different users are gathered together as the same work. Note the left-hand side. I think the top cover image is the cover of the most popular manifestation, and the other three are the next three most popular manifestations. Then there are eight links, each for other manifestations. That’s twelve manifestations (if I’m not double-counting duplicates) of one work. Two of the manifestations are translations, so the expression layer is collapsed.
There are details of what LibraryThing considers a work and what makes two things the same work. Those definitions closely match FRBR, but notice the last one: “A Greek edition of Homer is not the same as an English translation. Socially, the former connects you with other Greek scholars, and should recommend other Greek-language works, not the ‘Classics of Western Civilization’ works that the English translation does.” In FRBR terms, they’re the same work. For The Big Sleep, translations are the same work, as we saw above. I’d like to find out more about how Homer’s writings (and other Greek and Roman classics) are separated from other works and how it affects what users see.
This is a very nice piece of work! All of the tags and ratings and comments for all the different manifestations of something such as The Big Sleep come together at the work level, and their power is that much greater because the groups of book owners making them are larger and not divided by trivial differences of ISBNs. If Seamus has the 1970s Vintage edition and Marla has a Penguin edition, their tags and ratings are pooled instead of apparently referring to two completely different books. Users will get much more out of the system now.
When there’s some way to handle an omnibus edition such as the Library of America’s Stories and Early Novels of Chandler, which includes The Big Sleep, it’ll be all the better, though that’ll be even more difficult work. That’s aggregates! This is scheduled as a future improvement, says the page linked above.
There’s no mention of FRBR in the announcement of this and other new features. I wonder how Tim Spalding is doing the work of extracting works from manifestations. Congratulations to him on this stealth FRBRization of a home cataloguing tool. If you’re a LibraryThing user, by all means leave a comment about this if you have one. I think this is an exciting development.