[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

Thu May 27 14:17:57 UTC 2010

On 5/27/10 6:46 AM, Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> Karen Coyle wrote:
> <snip>
> 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.
> </snip>
>
> 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.
>    
So what you're saying is that what users want is the Expression, and I 
can agree with that. They don't know that's what they want, and in a 
public library in the US when you walk up to the desk (or go to the 
catalog) you probably don't need to specify the language in most cases 
because the libraries mainly carry English-language items. But rarely do 
users want a particular manifestation. (Maybe the ISTC -- the standard 
for text identifiers -- will be helpful here.)

I find the Work views in Open Library to be quite useful (although they 
need more facets on that page). [1]  We can link them up to discussions 
of the author and his/her works in Wikipedia, or to lit crit articles or 
reviews. If nothing else, the Work view means that users do not see the 
same thing over and over in the catalog display. If the Work view allows 
you to click on a language facet, then I think you've given the user the 
"least clicks" access to what they are looking for. And this is what I 
mean about turning this into useful functionality. Take the user to a 
page for Moby Dick (all versions, all languages). Have facets for 
language, format (audio book, large print book). Have links to the story 
as a movie, a comic book. But bring it all together in one page, don't 
make the user scroll through a long list. THAT is the value of isolating 
this thing that might be called a FRBR Work.

kc
[1] http://openlibrary.org/works/OL102749W/Moby_Dick

> Again, in the card catalog, the "work" was just one way for the cards to be arranged so that they could be browsed. They had to be in there somehow, and that was one way. But taking this old arrangement and declaring it to be an "entity" with different "attributes" is a fallacy in my opinion. It's not--it's an arrangement of cards (manifestations). Taking the concepts of "work" and "expression" beyond arrangement distorts them into something they are not, resulting in all kinds of strange problems, as people are discovering now and as your work has demonstrated.
>
> To continue, simply because catalogers arranged the cards in the drawers in certain ways does not mean that people ever "wanted" these arrangements. This "work" arrangement was probably most useful for the catalogers themselves, who needed an inventory of the collection.
>
> This is why I continue to maintain that we need to build something for our users *today*. What I am thinking about are some really new ideas, e.g. Google's displays, e.g.  http://tinyurl.com/2uu77gs, which has all kinds of cool things, although several I don't know how useful they are. I think people may find the word cloud useful, but I'm not sure if the Google API includes it. I have a feeling that Facebook may come up with something if they haven't already (for better or worse).
>
> I don't know how people search and what they want; I am learning about how I myself search, and it is almost totally different from what I did 25 years ago. I don't think anybody knows right now since it is changing constantly. But there is a lot of research being done on "information seeking behavior" and "scholarly communication".
>
> James Weinheimer  j.weinheimer at aur.edu
> Director of Library and Information Services
> The American University of Rome
> via Pietro Roselli, 4
> 00153 Rome, Italy
> voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
> fax-011 39 06 58330992
>
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>    

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet