Floyd and Renear, What Exactly Is an Item In the Digital World?
Ingbert R. Floyd and Allen H. Renear‘s What Exactly Is an Item in the Digital World? is up in their university’s repository. (“Institutional repositories,” for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are web sites where people can put stuff. Which is no big deal, except that they’re official and run by an institution — probably a university or its library — and there are probably more good intentions about putting stuff into them then actual stuff getting uploaded.) It’s a five-page paper but it says it’s a poster from the 2007 ASIST conference, so I don’t know. Floyd’s new to the blog but Renear’s been mentioned before.
ABSTRACT: IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a model of the bibliographic universe. Although initially its application to the digital world appears to be straightforward, upon closer examination puzzles arise. One is that within the digital world it is surprisingly difficult to say exactly what FRBR items really are. On the one hand, the ontological candidates for items (concrete physical states of the computing system) are rarely identified and treated as items in practice — even though they may indeed be affirmed as items in theoretical discussions. On the other hand, objects that manifestly fail to meet the basic ontological criteria for FRBR items are commonly treated as if they are items. We describe this situation and, based on a re-factoring of FRBR into a set of roles (relationships) rather than a set of entity types explore two possible resolutions. One, favored by the second author, is consistent with ontology implicit in the original FRBR vision, but allows assignment of item attributes and roles to things that are not items; the other, favored by the first author, is a radical departure from the underlying FRBR ontology, but preserves the original attribute assignments and roles.