IFLA news
Did you know that the Standing Committee of the IFLA Cataloguing Section has a newsletter called SCATNews? I didn’t. But thanks to Catalogablog I found the December 2007 issue of SCATNews (139 KB PDF), and there’s some FRBR (and FRAD and FRSAR) stuff in it, along with other international standards.
Page two says that the revisions to the definition of the Expression entity were accepted and will be published. The working group on aggregates is going to be at it for an extra two years because aggregates (things combined with, or containing, other things — think of all of the works in any issue of a newspaper or magazine, with all of those articles, photographs, cartoons, advertisements, etc.) are so confusing.
Page five has “What’s New with the FRBR Entity ‘Expresion’?” by Pat Riva and Anders Cato. I quote a bit of it:
Except for exact photographic reproductions, the only way to be absolutely positive that there are no tiny differences in the words contained in two different manifestations of the same textual work is to compare the two manifestations word-by-word. This is obviously something that is not going to happen in any normal cataloguing situation, with the unfortunate result that under a strict interpretation of the definition, the entity expression could never actually be applied, thus completely loosing [sic] its potential for organizing the displays of those works with many manifestations.
The revised version (a new expression!) isn’t on the web site yet, but it will replace the old version when it’s published.
Finally, on page seven Pat Riva (chair of the FRBR Review Group) reports that Ed O’Neill and Carol van Nuys left the Review Group when their terms ended, and Françoise Leresche (of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) and Eeva Murtomaa (who back in 2002 cowrote Data Mining MARC to Find: FRBR?) joined. Marg Stewart is the new liaison with the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA.