John Attig wrote:
I don't believe that FRBR deals explicitly with multiparts;
Well, the section "5.3.6.1 Whole/Part Relationships at the Item Level" explicitly addresses the issue. Without, admittedly, giving much guidance for dealing with it.
in FRBR terms, the entire multivolume set would constitute one item belonging to the manifestation of the expression of the work representing the set as a whole.
And how useful ist that? Shakespeare's "As you like it" as a part of a "Collected Plays" edition is not a manifestation of the work? Even if within this collection it is a separate volume with its own title page and perfectly citable? I believe we shouldn't like it that way.
Alternatively, each volume would be an item belonging to the manifestation of the expression of the work embodied in that volume. It seems to me that FRBR lets you model the situation either way -- or both.
For an isolated catalog, this used to be acceptable. For cooperative cataloging, it meant lots of duplicates in the database. For the RDA vision of a Bibliographic Universe of Everything, it is not even good enough. B.Eversberg
