[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

[Ross Singer]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer at aur.edu>wrote:

>
> Sorry Karen, I have never in my life known anyone who wanted the "work" of
> Moby Dick or Alice in Wonderland. They may be interested in a choice of
> specific language versions (expressions) but while you may be interested in
> all English translations of the Bible, and need some specific books and
> verses, I haven't met anyone who also needs Bulgarian and Chinese and Korean
> and Cherokee. What they (and I) would do would be to browse through the
> cards (as I later discovered, the uniform titles for these famous works),
> and "ooh!" and "aahh!" as I saw War and Peace in German, French, Chinese,
> Japanese, ... But I didn't need any of them.
>

Right, but it would be useful if you didn't have umpteen search results for
what are really the same thing (War and Peace) and instead the user had the
option to choose the language or edition from some sort of "Work" page.

I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine a scenario where the primary
language of the library's collection (let's say English) is understood by
the user (for sake of example, a foreign student) but if materials are
available in their native language or something they're perhaps more
familiar with (maybe they're Polish, but a little more fluent in German or
Russian than English), they can immediately see what's available, without
limiting their searches merely to those languages (which I would be
surprised if users generally did).  And while this is a bit of an edge case
(less so at large universities, probably, or public libraries with larger
immigrant populations), it's not solely limited to this particular
scenario.  Audiobooks, ebooks, film/television adaptations, etc. *all* would
be useful collated into some semblance of grouping around frbr (little "f")
notion of work.

-Ross.
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