Various blog mentions
- Judith E. Bush’s 80 millionth OCLC Number and a Personal Refresher on FRBR mentions sheet music and a MIDI version of a musical work as different expressions. (She wonders if she’s right about that, and she is, as long as it neither has been put into physical form, in which case they become manifestations and items.)
- Mark Lindner’s And On a Related Topic … Fun in the Classroom describes what sounds like a great class discussion about unexpressed works and unrealized expressions. Then he gets into some thoughts about whether FRBR can handle imaginary works (such as Camel Ride to the Tomb by X. Trapnel or Match Me Such Marvel by St. John Clarke). On top of that, I’d add the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and ask how FRBR can handle works etc. that exist only in parallel universes (which would include all those imaginary works). (I think all cataloguing and classification systems should be able to handle things made by aliens or in parallel worlds. “The library is a growing organism.”)
- Deborah Kaplan’s LibraryThing and FRBR concerns, as you would expect, LibraryThing and FRBR.
- Abigail Bordeaux was at the Open Repositories conference and FRBR came up there, as she reports in Days 3 and 4: Sunny and Sixty. People said “copy” instead of “item.”
- A few weeks ago I mentioned Frédérick Giasson’s Music Ontology and now he’s made version 1.02 available.
I’m very confused about your comment “as long as it neither has been put into physical form, in which case they become manifestations and items.”
How can sheet music or a midi file exist at all “without being put into physical form?” I assume you are NOT suggesting that whether something exists only digitally (born digital and not transferred into anything else), or instead exists in the physical world–has any implication on it’s FRBR entity analysis. But that’s what some people are going to read by what you’ve said.
Neither sheet music nor a midi file EXISTS until they have been put into some ‘fixed’ form of some kind. The question is whether they belong to the SAME expression, or different expressions. It’s not all clear to me which is best. In one sense, a midi file is nothing more than a particular digital encoding of the _exact same notes_ found in sheet music. That would seem to suggest to me that it’s a different manifestation of the same expression. On the other hand, is it really going to be the _exact_ same notes, or is some over-simplification neccesary for midi-ization? Is it then just a question of “how much change is enough” to make a new expression, which is the key question about exprsesions, and is really just a matter of convention and community consensus. Either way would probably be fine.
But I can’t see how it has anything to do with whether one or another “has been put into physical form”.
Incidentally, I often see people erroneously assuming that a change in _format_ means a change in expression. It does not. It does, of course, indicate a change in manifestation. But among the manifestations of a given expression, some of them might be one format, others another format, a single other a third format–but all can be manifestations of the same expression. If you want to sub-divide by format, you can’t do that simply by collocating a Group 1 entity’s members, but you instead can do that by using the ‘format’ attributes of the manifestation entities. Not everything of interest is simply a collocation according to group 1 relationships.
Comment by Jonathan Rochkind — 5 February 2007 @ 4:35 pmI’d also note that a midi file may have MORE than sheet music (say, more specific assignments of instruments; in some cases even samples, although that’s not typical), as well as less. It’s probably not going to contain the _exact_ same expression, although theoretically it could–theoretically you could turn a midi file into sheet music, that _might_ look exactly the same as the sheet music you used to create the midi file. In practice I don’t know how likely that is to occur. And then we could talk about a hand-written score in the composer’s own hand—of course that has some unique content that isn’t going to be appear in the score to midi back to sheet music transition. But FRBR analysis isn’t generally concerned with this level of information, or is it? Does a handwritten manuscript (manifestation 1) belong to the same expression as the first edition (manifestation 2)? Not if it was edited a lot, but yes if the handwritten manuscript was printed as is? What if it included marinalia?
In general, there is no absolute right or wrong answer to these things, they are subjective, and context- and community- dependent. Certain choices will be made by codes of practice for given communities in given contexts (ie RDA), or by unwritten rules of developing common practice, or by individual judgement as to what would be most useful in a given community–they are not mandated by the FRBR model itself.
Comment by Jonathan Rochkind — 5 February 2007 @ 4:45 pmI should proofread. That should read “It’s probably not going to contain the _exact_ same information” (rather than ‘expression’; but this is how I think of ‘expressions’ as being defined—if two manifestations contain ‘the same’ information, they belong to the same expression).
And ‘marinalia’, should be ‘marginalia’ of course, an uncommon enough word that your eyes may not skip over my typo easily.
Comment by Jonathan Rochkind — 5 February 2007 @ 4:48 pmJonathan, when you said, “How can sheet music or a midi file exist at all ‘without being put into physical form?’” you were quite right. Neither can be anything but physical. Sorry about that. They’re manifestations and items, not expressions.
Comment by wtd — 9 February 2007 @ 9:44 pm