At 09:48 AM 3/8/2010, Karen Coyle wrote:
Quoting John Attig <[email protected]>:
At 06:28 PM 3/7/2010, Karen Coyle wrote:
On a purely practical level, don't we need an entry in the catalog
that represents what the library purchased as a published thing? The
three DVD set is going to be on some purchase order, and the catalog
still has to fulfill the inventory function, right?
One might argue that the inventory function -- as well as ordering and
receiving, invoicing, etc. -- is related to the particular item(s), not
to the work, expression, or even the manifestation.
This would be an interesting separation of the "bibliographic" and
inventory management functions -- which I think do not always fit
together neatly. However, FRBR diagrams the item as being associated
with only one manifestation (although a manifestation can have
multiple items), which implies that the manifestation and item must
describe the same "thing."
If FRBR in fact models the item as associated with only one
manifestation, then this is an obvious oversimplification -- as many
have discovered when they learned that their systems have been
designed on this same premise and therefore are not capable of
dealing with bound-with/issued-with/filmed-with/etc. resources.
It strikes me that it might be useful to construct modeling built
around the item, which is after all what we all have in hand when we
catalog and what we have in our collections. In order to support
discovery (as opposed to the inventory and other item-based
functions), the item needs to be linked to the manifestation,
expression, and work. In a typical case (at least one in which there
are multiple expressions and works), the items are the base of a
pyramid, with a single work at the apex. In other cases (the ----
with cases), the item is at the apex of the pyramid and the works at
the base. In other cases (compilations, augmentations, etc.), the
geometry can get rather complex.
John Attig
Penn State University
[email protected]
