Not a manifestation was stirring
Here’s something interesting from the LibraryThing blog, 25 February: ‘Twas the Night Before LibraryThing. A user, _Celeste_, has entered 107 different versions of Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, better known as The Night Before Christmas.
Here’s the work The Night Before Christmas on LibraryThing. Notice all the covers on the left. Moore wrote a poem, and different illustrators have taken it on and done art for it, thus providing their own complementary (“so closely connected to the other work in the relationship that it has little value outside the context of that other work“) referential (“intended to be combined with or inserted into the related work“) works. All those covers are covers of manifestations of aggregate works combining Moore’s poem with an artist’s drawings or paintings.
There are other derivative works, such as A Fisherman’s Night Before Christmas, by Shauna Mooney Kawasaki, and they’ve all been tagged with nb4x (as in “night before Xmas”). In a fully FRBRized catalogue the relationship these books have to the original poem would be indicated. Meanwhile, _Celeste_ is using LibraryThing in an inventive way to do what she can. Not many users care about this level of detail, but _Celeste_ does, having much more complicated bibliographic needs. She has to use the n4bx tag to represent different sorts of entity relationships
Here’s how Open WorldCat handles some of the manifestations. It includes Garfield’s Night Before Christmas, by Clement Moore and Jim Davis, with the other straight illustrated versions of the poem. I wonder if Davis just did the illustrations, in which case it fits, or if he rewrote it, in which case I think OCLC”s algorithm is a bit too inclusive.