With all due respect to Stephen, I do not read those passages of FRBR the same way he does. I don't actually consider the original release of the film to be a distinct work; I consider it to be one of many expressions of the work, as FRBR does. However, when you look at the expressions that make up the work, I believe you can distill from them more information about the work than Stephen is apparently willing to do. For example, we don't have the "original release version" of Homer's Iliad to work from, so we have less evidence than we would have with more modern works such as films, but we can at least assert that Homer's Iliad is a work of poetry. If we have a sculpture or a piece of music in hand that is titled Homer's Iliad, we can safely assume that it is a different work. When you look at all of the expressions of Casablanca, you can discover the following attributes of the visual work Casablanca: it is a black and white film; it is not a wide-screen film; it is a sound film. The colourized videocassette of Casablanca can therefore be seen to be a flawed copy, not a new version of the film. (I wish we could treat abridged editions as flawed copies, as well--I have been burned several times by bibliographic descriptions that did not make clear that something was an abridgement!)
The reason I think RDA is to be applauded for trying to separate carrier from content as it does in Chapters 3 and 4 is that I still have hopes that we can eventually solve the multiple versions problem on behalf of our currently tortured users (smile); thus I think it is important to be able eventually to place the content pieces of our old physical description in the content (expression and work) part of the display, and the carrier pieces in the carrier (manifestation) part of the display. This will help us to build displays that begin with work description, proceed to expression description, and only then list manifestations of each expression, so that users can more readily scan through the expressions of a sought work in order to select the optimum manifestation. Martha -----Original Message----- From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Stephen Hearn Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 12:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Comments from Martha Yee on Chapters 3-4 Martha Yee's comments sent me back to the FRBR report one more time, specifically to understand better the FRBR definitions of "work" and "expression." Based one today's reading, I'd question Martha's assumption that the original release of a film is properly to be considered as a distinct "work." FRBR specifies that the "work" is "an abstract entity" which "exists only in the commonality of content between and among various expressions of the work." The point of the example given for "work," Homer's Iliad, is not simply that the text of a FRBR "work" may be uncertain; it is that FRBR "works" by their nature do not have fixed "texts." From the discussions of "work" and "expression" (sections 3.2.1 and 3.2.2) it's generally clear that the original realization of a work is itself never more than an expression of the FRBR "work," however privileged the original may be in critical discussions of the "work" as defined by scholars. That being the case, the points made about motion picture color, sound, aspect ratio, etc., as being characteristics of the "work's" content are not in agreement with the FRBR concepts. At most, they are all characteristics of expression-level content. What's more, the FRBR report discusses expression differences in fairly fluid terms. The statement that "Variant expressions in the same form ... will often be indirectly identified as different expressions because the variation is apparent from the data associated with an attribute used to identify the manifestation in which the expression is embodied ...." That "indirectly" is a bit obscure, but FRBR apparently accepts the idea that not all differences between expressions are made at the expression level of the description. So again, using carrier characteristics in the manifestion description to distinguish between different expressions is still consistent with the FRBR concepts. Stephen **************************************************** Stephen Hearn Authority Control Coord./Database Mgmt. Section Head Technical Services Dept. University of Minnesota 160 Wilson Library Voice: 612-625-2328 309 19th Avenue South Fax: 612-625-3428 Minneapolis, MN 55455 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
