Jonathan:
I think these are all issues, and Karen's response to John reflected
some of my approach to these as well. But let me try and be clear about
where I think we need to go.
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
Martha's explanation of her argument for a FRBR model of motion pictures
makes sense to me.
This discussion highlights a few things for me:
1) Even though FRBR with it's four Group 1 entities is already
considered too complicated by some people (who think we only need three,
or two), it's actually still only a modelled approximation of the
complexity of our actual bibliographic/information universe. What we
represent will neccesarily be one model, and an approximation. But
that's okay--our systems can and should draw relationships between what
the users need not limited to the Group 1 Entity hieararchy anyway!
I think I would put it that there is a model, and there are different
views about how this model should be applied. Our opinion on the
validity of these views reflect our background and experience. There
is, as John Attig notes, a "mainstream" view (which could be called a
"text-resources-cataloging view"), which tends to gloss over some of the
complexity that some of our specialist colleagues see all too clearly in
the materials they describe.
2) The work of coming to general agreements about conventions for how we
are going to model the messy real world in our model to have reasonable
consistency--is still a work in progress. Which is fine, as long as it
actually progresses. Discussions like this help. Ideally I would hope
that RDA will give guidance on this: Here is how to decide work
boundaries, here is how to decide expression boundaries, etc.--that's
the function I would see RDA playing. I'm not certain if it does or not.
Certainly AACR2 does to some extent, but not in that language, and not
neccesarily in the right ways. What do people think, is RDA on it's way
to succesfully giving guidance here?
Historically we have tended to believe that there is common ground and
attempted to find it. This has really frustrated the specialists and
lead to the fracturing of the community in some ways that I believe are
not necessary moving forward. I don't think RDA can or should provide
anything other than a general overview of the principles and
guidance--when it goes off into the specialist arena is where it is at
its most shaky. Any guidance about boundaries between FRBR entities
might be helpful in a general sense but cannot be the last word on the
subject, because clearly there are legitimate differences on how
specialist communities view the problems and the solutions. Constantly
going over the issues looking for a "right" way to do it is, I believe,
futile and unnecessary.
3) While it is, I agree, useful to have some conventions and guidelines
for consistency in a document like RDA, exactly how lock-step this
consistency needs to be is something that needs to be investigated and
analyzed (and which there is and will be significant controversy on; one
of the poles of cataloging thought is definitely to try and enforce
absolute uniformity, although to my reading that's never been that
succesful). But no matter how much uniformity we try to enforce, and
even if we are succesful within our 'own' community, we will, like it or
not, be integrating data from entirely different sources which do not
follow those uniform rules too. I think we can likely be succesful in
getting these other sources to follow the
Work-Expression-Manifestation-Item model (because it is useful, and
there is nothing competing), or else succesfully translate foreign data
to this model. But we aren't going to be succesful in forcing everyone
everywhere to make the same decisions about exactly where work
boundaries or expression boundaries are. So an unresolved question and
useful research program is: How do we build systems that deal with
integrating records from sources that have made _different_ decisions
about where work boundaries or expression boundaries are? (or even
manifestation boundaries; ISBN can be seen as a different decision about
how to draw manifestation boundaries, although one that isn't as
problematic as it could be because their manifestation sets end up being
strict subsets of ours; I think. Would be worse if they were overlapping
rather than strict sub/superset..)
I think your point here that going forward we will necessarily have to
cope with a lot of different views that come from those who have never
been part of the library community is a critical piece. Instead of
looking to RDA's guidance to paper over our differences in viewpoint, I
think what we'll need to do instead is attempt to document those
differences, and cope with them in practice.
One way to do this is for the specialist communities to document the way
they apply their FRBR boundaries, how they use roles, etc., in a
machine-readable way (an application profile) and include a reference to
this profile when they share their records with others. That way, when
we use their data, we will be able to answer the question, "who says,"
in a way that allows us to intelligently interpret their intention and
use their data along with the other data we have. This way, we can move
beyond the conversations--interesting and informative as they are--that
instead of finding common ground serve only to highlight the fact that
there are reasonable differences in how we see these "boundary" issues
being resolved.
The challenge for the group working on the formal expression of
vocabularies is to find strategies to enable these decisions to be
realized in the data without forcing people to twist the element
vocabulary in ways that will prevent data from being interoperable.
Ideally, of course, we won't be depending on each cataloger to have a
deep understanding of FRBR and RDA prior to producing
descriptions--because of course, some of the people using RDA won't even
be catalogers and we're unlikely to have the luxury of just talking to
ourselves in future.
Diane
Jonathan
Laurence Creider wrote:
Martha,
You answered all of my questions except the one at the beginning, and
I should have addressed that to Greta de Groat. You did not make the
statement about actors being a characteristic of the work rather than
the expression. I apologize for the confusion, although I would still
like an answer from someone.
I certainly agree with what you say about the adaptation in making a
visual work from a textual one and about the cases you cite. I wonder,
however, if the same arguments could not also be said of a stage
production of Shakespeare. Recordings of stage productions are treated
by cataloging rules as versions of the play, but the textual component
of a play is the very bare bones of the play. Plays, as operas, are
frequently performed with cuts of text, but addition of scenery,
blocking, inflection, direction, production are analogous to film
activities. They don't seem to go over the edge to being a new work,
and I am somewhat curious how it is that they do not. The intent of
the producers, actors, designers, etc. could be argued to make the
difference, but intent might not be as easy to establish as one would
think. Is the difference made by the intellectually creative
difference made by the cinematographer and director, and editor(s),
who shape what we see in perhaps a more fundamental way than the stage
director? Or is it the textual adaptation required in moving a text
from print or stage to screen?
Larry Creider
On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Martha Yee wrote:
Creider's asks, "One question I have for Martha is why a change in
actors
results in a different work?" I would argue that moving images are
essentially visual works, not textual ones; in order to change a
textual
work into a visual work, adaptation is inherently necessary. The
situation
is complicated by the fact that it is possible to use moving image as a
mere recording medium. I don't mind identifying a stage performance of
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a work by Shakespeare when the stage
performance has been recorded by a stationary video camera. When
Shakespeare's play is transformed into a moving image (visual) work
by the
contributions of screenwriters, cinematographers, editors and
directors,
however, I believe a new related work has been created. Anglo-American
practice hitherto has agreed with me, as does FRBR in the Zeffirelli
example...
Hope that clarifies my position?
Martha
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martha M. Yee
Cataloging Supervisor
UCLA Film & Television Archive
1015 N. Cahuenga Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038-2616
323-462-4921 x27
323-469-9055 (fax)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Email at work)
Campus mail:
302 E. Melnitz
132306
1413 Quintero St.
Los Angeles, CA 90026-3417
213-250-3018
213-250-3018 (fax)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Email at home)
http://myee.bol.ucla.edu (Web page)
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
"You have a dollar. I have a dollar. We swap. Now you have my dollar
and I
have your dollar. We are not better off. You have an idea. I have an
idea.
We swap. Now you have two ideas and I have two ideas. Both are
richer. When
you gave, you have. What I got, you did not lose. That?s
cooperation"?Jimmy
Durante quoted in Schnozzola, by Gene Fowler, 1951, p. 207-208.
Laurence S. Creider
Head, General Cataloging Unit &
Special Collections Librarian
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Work: 505-646-4707, 505-646-7227
Fax: 505-646-7477
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
