Ostrowsky on xISBN and grouping things
Ben Ostrowsky posted An Interesting Idea for Using xISBN Information last week. He was (as so many of us do) chatting about FRBR with a friend and explained about OCLC’s xISBN service. The friend asked, “Now the question is … can a patron place a hold for the entire cluster? Say, a child who has been assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird and doesn’t care which edition?”
Ostrowsky shows how this doesn’t work: in particular, all the different translations are bunched together, and there’s a big difference between not caring whether you get the latest paperback version of a book or the printing from ten years ago and not caring whether you get the original English version or a translation into an other (any other) language.
With a fully FRBRized catalogue, this will be easy to do. xISBN is an excellent tool, but it only groups manifestations into works. It doesn’t know about the expressions. The kid who wants To Kill a Mockingbird wants the original English text, but that probably isn’t the way he or she would think about it. (In the Harry Potter example I had the original expression separated from all of the translations so it’s easier to see what’s what.) The kid basically wants a button that says “Get me this book.” “This book” means a regular-sized print verson. If that isn’t available, as Ostrowsky says, the system could fall back to other manifestations (large print) or other expressions (audiobooks, or translations) or even other works (the movie version).
This is a good demonstration of the levels of detail that we can show to users and how that’s more than they usually care about. I’ll do more about this in another Harry Potter example.