[open-bibliography] Proposed definition for /book/book

Wed Jun 30 08:12:35 UTC 2010

Sorry to be coming in late in this discussion. I'm slightly unsure about commenting on this as I don't know the background to how you got here, and some of these discussions may have already happened.

"A book is a written work or a collection of written works in book form. "Book" represents the abstract notion of a particular book, rather than a particular edition. It is on this level that articles or discussion about a book should generally occur (e.g., the article about Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is on the book topic, rather than on one or more of the hundreds of editions it has gone through)."

I have to admit that I think the definition of 'book' given here is slightly confusing as it takes a commonly used term and defines it as something different. It also seems to have some inconsistencies as later in the definition we have:

"Things that are books: written works that have never appeared in a traditional bound form, such as those released only in audio or electronic formats" - which seems to conflict slightly with the opening statement of the definition.

Some of these issues have been discussed widely in the library community, and although the conclusions there are perhaps far from perfect, it seems that there is some significant overlap but with different terminology. In particular I'm thinking of FRBR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records)

What you are defining here as a 'book' seems to have much in common with what FRBR terms a 'work'. For me it would make a lot of sense if there could be some work to pull this together in some way. Also of interest is recent discussion on the OKFN Open Bibliographic Data working group (cross posted here) - there is a wide ranging discussion from May and June worth looking at http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-bibliography/

Hope this is helpful and not rehashing stuff that has already been discussed.

Owen

Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: owen at ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

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