[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

Thu May 27 14:14:14 UTC 2010

Please stop writing such interesting stuff on this - I really can't afford to get dragged into it!

comments inline...

rob

On 27 May 2010, at 14:14, Karen Coyle wrote:

> Quoting Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
>
>
>> What I find immediately confusing in Scenario 1 is why Vonnegut's
>> novel is a Work but the translation is an Expression? For example,
>> both efforts would receive copyright as new "works",  though the
>> translation would obviously be considered a "derivative work".

I agree with Rufus, FRBR is at odds with the world in this sense.

> No, the way Work is defined in FRBR it is the conceptualization, even
> if translated into different languages. Being turned from a book to a
> movie, however, creates a new work.

Yes, that was agreed as the 'standard' but only after a great deal of debate and discussion. It seemed to me at the time that this was, at best, a compromise for the sake of agreement rather than a broad understanding that this was in some sense correct.

> It actually makes sense.

Does it?

> If I read Mann's Magic Mountain in English,
> and you read it in the original German, we could still have a
> conversation about what we liked and disliked about the book (Work).
> We read the same Work, but in different expressions.

In common parlance people would generally say they had read the same "book" which is one of the problems. If you need an unambiguous term then perhaps you could say you had read the same story. There are many aspects that will be common and certainly the translation is not as noteworthy as the original work, but the translation is a creative work in its own right (as any translator will tell you).

> And in response to Jim, the Work level is one that is very useful for
> user services. Most users come to the library asking for a Work, not a
> manifestation. They want to read Moby Dick or Alice in Wonderland or
> the latest book in the Twilight series, and it is the story they are
> interested in, and that is the Work.

And yet, in many contexts the movie will provide an appealing, or even preferred, substitute for the book. Yet by recognising the movie as a work we no longer recognised the relationship with the novel on which it is based. Even more so should we consider the relationship between Rome and Juliet and West Side Story, or the relationship between Mama Mia and the Abba songs.

FRBR has abstracted away all the detail that would allow this rich tapestry to be described in a useful way.

>
>>
>> While it is clear there is a derivative relation to be expressed it
>> seems to me the Work-Expression hierarchy is the wrong way to do this.
>
> In many ways I agree. The better way to do this may be to emphasize
> relationships (this is a translation of...) rather than try to create
> this 4-layer group of entities. One reason given for the different
> entities is that they are necessary in order to create relationships,
> like "this is a translation of that expression."

This is the point I argued in 'bring frbr down to earth'.

The relationships are key and the WEMI hierarchy is too simplistic. By being too simplistic it becomes very hard to fit the rich tapestry of the real-world into it - it's only 3 parts away from saying everything is just a thing.

The translation example above is a good one. Translations may be of many things, even in the case of rare manuscripts of a specific physical object. The relationships are key - and a heap of real-world classes would help too.

>
>
>>
>> Thanks for pointing this out. How does one submit feedback -- just
>> edit the page? (It looks so neat!)
>>
>
> Last time I tried, the wiki was housed elsewhere and was so hard to
> edit that we had folks send their comments to a few of us, and we
> edited for them. Since then it has moved to a new home, but I haven't
> really tried to edit. I'll look into that.
>
> Some discussion can take place on the dc-rda discussion list, which is
> the list for the project that produced those pages.
> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-rda.html. It's a DC task group. It
> hasn't been terribly active lately, but it still might be the best
> place to talk about some of these things.
>
> kc
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
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> skype: kcoylenet
>
>
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Rob Styles
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