Charlton, Frankenstein, or the Modern FRBR
I’m about to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the Norton Critical Edition, third edition, edited by Robert Kimbrough . A friend has to read it for a course and since I’ve never read it I said I’d give it a go and we’d talk about it. The Norton edition has the novel, but the text changed in different editions, so the editor did a lot of work preparing this version and explains what he did and why. The novel is 69 pages long and there are about 350 pages of other stuff: writings on the Congo, other writings by Conrad and his contemporaries, criticism, a map, a bibliography, etc. While looking at it and reading about the various texts, I thought, “This would be a hard book to fully FRBRize.”
Last month Galen Charlton posted Frankenstein, or the Modern FRBR on the Liblime Developers’ Blog. He was looking at the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, and wrote a nice long post looking at how bibliographically complicated it is and how rich and useful but difficult it will be to capture all of the bibliographic information and relationships involved.
If you’re part of a group working on a new library discovery layer, or some kind of similar tool(s), keep these kinds of books in mind. If a vendor says they do FRBR, ask them if they mean they use xISBN (and thingISBN?) or if they can actually get medieval on a work like this.