Coyle, Hierarchy v. Relationships
I bet you read Karen Coyle’s blog already, and if you don’t you should, but I’ll keep on linking when she mentions FRBR because that’s what I do. In Wednesday’s Hierarchy v. Relationships she says at the end, after discussing works, expressions, and manifestations:
The truly interesting relationships in FRBR are those between and among these entities, and those are ones that I have not seen explored. These are the relationships between things: thing1 is a translation of thing2; thing3 is an abridgment of thing4; thing5 extends thing6 in this certain way; thing7 cites thing1; thing8 continues thing3. This is where we get real value, where we provide various interesting paths through which seekers can navigate. This is what we don’t provide explicitly in our catalogs today, although a human user may be able to intuit some of these relationships among the works we present.
We have so narrowly defined bibliographic control in libraries that it doesn’t really include the relationships between intellectual products, except to the degree that we might make a note that one thing is a translation of another thing. But we see those relationships as “extra” or “secondary,” and yet they are the very essence of knowledge creation. It astonishes me that we have focused so completely on the physical items that we have essentially missed what would make our catalogs intelligent.
Preach it.