Minutes from August IFLA meetings
Pat Riva, chair of the group, sent along a pointer to updates to the list of meeting and activity reports of the FRBR Review Group. Two sets of minutes from the August meetings in Seoul are now up.
First, there’s the FRBR Review Group Meeting Report, 20 August 2006 (162 KB PDF). I strongly agree with this quote; this same thinking is what led me to OpenFRBR:
Discussion focused on the recommendation that the RG should give more priority to advocacy, specifically developing evidence-based arguments that demonstrate the value of FRBR. This recommendation stems from the observation that vendors have a perception that FRBR implementation is costly, and that purchasers of systems are not sufficiently aware of the benefits of FRBR for end users to request it. Demonstration projects have great potential in demonstrating value concretely.
The other new report is Working Group on Aggregates Meeting Report, 20 August 2006 (174 KB PDF). Aggregates are tricky, and that’s why there’s a special group looking into them.
The discussion centered on a debate describing two distinct models for aggregates (independently created works published together).
Examples: Audio CD, Web sites, Conference proceedings, Anthologies of poetry and/or prose literature, Song/music books, Trilogies, Conference proceedings, Serials (collections that are intended to be together), Monographic series (collections that are intended to be together)
Model 1: The whole is a manifestation that functions as the glue that holds a set of works together.
Model 2: The whole is a work in and of itself: a “work-of-works.”
Proposed activity: The group will collect examples of aggregates, whose relationships will be described using each of the two models under review.
This is important work and I look forward to the results. I’ll have to think over some examples and see which model works best. It’s a knotty issue.
Re aggregates: I like the idea that the whole is a manifestation that combines (specific expressions of) disparate works. I like this because it just makes sense to me, and also because it is consistent with the idea that historical cataloging has generally been at the manifestation level—there is generally a bib record for an aggregate whole, so let’s call that a manifestation. If we call that a work instead, then it’s an unusual case of a traditional bib record at work level, which makes things more confusing in understanding how to map from past and existent data to the future.
But I guess it’s not neccesarily the best idea to make decisions based mainly on what has been traditional. Fortunately, in this case it just makes sense to me too. An aggregate is simply not “distinct intellectual or artistic creation”, is it? And each of those components parts could also exist independently. If the aggregate is a work in itself—what is the proper relationship between the aggregate work, and the work comprised of a component part manifested independently? It just doesn’t make sense.
Of course, allowing a manifestation in some cases to contain more than one work makes the model more complicated too, we don’t have a simple hiearchy of Group 1 entities anymore.
It also opens things up to people wanting to say the illustrations to an edition of Alice in Wonderland are a seperate work, the text is another, together they are an aggregate. But you know what? I think the FRBR model _should_ support decisions like that. In some collections (but not all/most) that may make sense. It’s important to remember that FRBR is NOT a cataloging code—decisions on creating common practice is something beyond FRBR, FRBR just creates the framework that should be capable of supporting a _variety_ of implementations.
Comment by Jonathan — 2 November 2006 @ 12:11 pm