[open-bibliography] More verbs. Electronic 'Items' (Yes, another FRBR thread)

Tue Jul 13 07:51:54 UTC 2010

Graham,

It looks like a wonderful project you are working on and should help a lot of people. And it's very interesting that we are seeing a return to the old scribal traditions of the pre-printing days, a tradition that has been forgotten, where today we take for granted that with additional editions (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. editions) we end up with successive *improvements* of the text, we should remember that this idea of "improvement" has only been with us since the introduction of printing. Before printing, it was entirely turned around: the idea that the farther away from the original text we were, the more *corrupt* the text becomes, because of all the errors in hand copying. Therefore, in a world with all manuscripts the task was to recreate the original version.  Amazing how that is being transferred to the situation of today!

My own opinion is that OPMV is a step in the right direction, and there are places to describe where, when and how changes took place and who did them, I see no provision there for detailing *what those changes were*, which is what people really want. To get an idea of a traditional manuscript collation, there is a good discussion at: http://www.skypoint.com/members/waltzmn/Collations.html with good examples, http://www.skypoint.com/members/waltzmn/Collations.html#Samples. This same basic method is used for early printed books as well although they also consider how the book was put together.

The traditional library determinations of an edition/manifestation that I pointed out before are based much more on changes in the physical item than in the changes in the text, i.e. if the transcription of the title page, formal edition statement, dates (within certain limitations), physical paging, and series statement is all the same, it is *assumed* to be the same edition/manifestation and is therefore handled as an item. But of course, the text inside could be slightly different or even completely different because librarians do not have the time to check compare texts so thoroughly. The opposite is the same as well: if something on the title page, dates, etc. is *different* it is considered a new edition even though the text may be completely the same. (This has resulted several scams by unscrupulous publishers, by the way; plus it happens more honestly with US vs. UK publications) In librarian terminology, this is called "content vs. carrier". Library tradition, under pressure of productivity, has almost always concentrated much more on carrier.

Naturally, the traditional collation methods of manuscripts cannot be used on web materials and I think the librarian emphasis on carrier also does not serve well in a digital environment. Still, the final product of a manuscript collation can be are pretty nice, since it details the changes very clearly. Modern tools can recreate these things automatically, e.g. in the Wikipedia History pages http://tinyurl.com/33khhjj where you can select any versions you want and the changes are displayed very clearly. 

In your case, could you do something similar to the Wikipedia history page by doing file compares or something?

James L. Weinheimer  j.weinheimer at aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
________________________________________
From: open-bibliography-bounces at lists.okfn.org [open-bibliography-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of William Waites [william.waites at okfn.org]
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 6:46 PM
To: List for Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data
Subject: Re: [open-bibliography] More verbs. Electronic 'Items' (Yes,   another FRBR thread)

On 10-07-12 12:29, graham wrote:
> I would like to have some way to
> identify these texts as coming from a particular original (the internet
> archive is mostly extremely good at maintaining the camera metadata for
> its scans, so there is a solid starting point), but also to identify the
> series of processes it has been through after that.
>
> Are there any existing ways to handle this kind of thing? None of my
> ideas for creating hashes of data + organization name as unique version
> identifiers seem to hold up :-( I really don't believe attempting to
> catalogue all the variants is either possible or desireable, surely each
> version needs to be self-describing, not listed in a single place.
>

Sounds like the OPMV vocabulary might be useful, it deals
with Artifacts and Processes operating on Artifacts (controlled
by Agents).

http://open-biomed.sourceforge.net/opmv/ns.html

There is support in ORDF for this, see for example,
http://ordf.org/schema/ordf where the opmv:wasGeneratedBy
is filled in by the python process that imports a text file
into the database -- and in this case doesn't perform any
transformations but could well do.

Cheers,
-w

--
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK

RDF Indexing, Clustering and Inferencing in Python
                http://ordf.org/

_______________________________________________
open-bibliography mailing list
open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography