[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

Sun May 30 17:50:29 UTC 2010

I've been on holiday for the past week (read: offline) but I must jump
into this potentially finished FRBR discussion ;)

I've been troubled by the layering in the model. 'Work' as an almost
platonic ideal, the distinct artistic creation, almost fits and 'Item'
as a physical embodiment is pretty understandable. 

Where I hit the brick wall is with Manifestation and Expression - for
me, the relationships and context around 'creations' are numerous and
interdependent: Translations, editions, etc are very loose terms for
sometimes complex activities - at what point does a translation cross
those boundaries? Take Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowolf for
example.

Doesn't this come down to an individual's interpretation of what
constitutes an artistic creation? If so, haven't we learnt that to build
in any form of centralised control over the decision of what is art (ie
a new Work) and what isn't (a new Expression) is a bit of a folly?

I think there is a mismatch between what exists and the FRBR
compartmentalisation. What we really have are items with
multidimensional* relationships to other items that only make sense in
context. Forgive my RDF-biased metaphor but I see items as being any
node in a graph and that graph containing much of the information on the
people, publishers, sources of data, book holdings, and so on. Note that
not all this information could exist in a computer system - it is
important to remember the info in a cataloguer's head or the head of the
user performing a search as this heavily affects their understanding and
interpretation of the computer's data.

* variability in terms of translation, version, edition, age, source,
publisher, editor and many more predicates

In summary, I think that FRBR is trying to make (potentially) graphable
data fit a small, short hierarchy without many verbs (as danbri
reportedly said via Karen).

I would suggest that there is a lot of mileage in allowing people to
share what their perception of what levels like these could be used for
in a live system. We may find the need for several types of Work or none
at all. I would gamble on Expression and Manifestation rapidly
collapsing together for the benefit of all ;)

Ben

On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 12:02 +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> On 26 May 2010 18:01, Christopher Gutteridge <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> > I think I would feel much more confident about FRBR's
> > Work/Expression/Manifestation/Item model if there was a robust set of
> > examples of each level in the model.
> >
> > The best I could find is
> >
> > the work, a distinct intellectual or artistic creation
> > the expression, the intellectual or artistic realization of a work
> > the manifestation, the physical embodiment of an expression of a work
> > the item, a single exemplar of a manifestation.
> >
> > Which is all very well, but it's still pretty impenetrable. I'd like to see
> > (in the first 10 results for googling FRBR) some examples, such as books,
> > videos, music, a PDF of a confernce paper, a recording of a performance of a
> > play, and so forth. I think it would cut through much of the confusion.
> 
> I made a stab at this in the following wiki page, mainly for my own
> understanding and that of others on Bibliographica here:
> 
> <http://wiki.okfn.org/p/Bibliographica/FRBR>
> 
> I've also tried to link to the most useful FRBR resources I'd found at
> the bottom of that (I'm sure there's many I've missed!)
> 
> Rufus
> 
> _______________________________________________
> open-bibliography mailing list
> open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography