Last week in FRBR #13
Assunção, FRBR and Music Uniform Title
Maria Clara Assunção has a paper called “FRBR and Music Uniform Title” in Páginas a & b 2:4 (2009), pp. 143-153.
The concepts of “work” and “expression” introduced by FRBR model, have particular implications for the rationale behind the construction of music uniform titles and can help to significantly improve the identification of musical works through this cataloguing resource. This study results from the practical need to establish a set of effective criteria in the development of uniform titles for musical works of a diverse nature, mostly of doubtful identification, often handwritten and sometimes anonymous. This paper aims to contribute to clarify this vital resource in the cataloguing of music but often avoided or misapplied.
LibraryThing, A FRBR Model of Publishers
I spent some time cleaning out my inbox. At work I’ve been doing Inbox Zero for a long time and it’s an enormous help, but my personal mailbox had a bunch of stuff in it that was dragging me down, so I started deleting. One thing I found was from Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding, sent in May 2009, pointing out a discussion on the LT site: A FRBR Model of of Publishers.
As many know, LibraryThing has a concept of “works” being composed of editions. And we have author and tag aliases.
Together, these concepts resemble what librarians call the FRBR model, and its siblings FRAR, FRSAR, FRBRoo, and FR-lama-lama-ding-dong.
Now, I want to do publishers. That is, I want to have pages for publishers.
This requires some model of how publishers are. An ideal model would understand that HarperCollins used to be called Harper Collins, that Collins is an imprint of HarperCollins, but was an independent company, etc. Truly publishers and imprints are much worse than authors or works. They’re a river you can’t step in twice and that calls itself a stream the next day. Also the river is only really significant insofar as books float down it. And there are beavers making dams, and fish and… Okay, not the last part.
So, does anyone have any advice on this problem? What does FRBR look like when applied to publishers, imprints and etc.?
I don’t know if this lead anywhere. To my surprise, even for the new Stephen King, Under the Dome, no publisher is listed in the Common Knowledge section. (It’s Scribner.) I had a look at a few books and didn’t see a Publisher field on any of them. I don’t know what’s going on there, or where Tim got with this, but that’s what happens when you let email sit around for eight months and then feel bad about not dealing with it.