Stephen Hearn wrote: > As a matter of practical implementation, we'd be wise to set aside the > "workness" of a large number of aggregates. In most cases, a > manifestation-level treatment of such aggregates is all that's needed to > anchor all the relationships that matter with other FRBR entities. To > promote such aggregates to being described as works purely as a matter > of principle would be to bury the limited population of works that most > of us care about under an avalanche of "works" that are largely > redundant, e.g., all the editions of "In our time" which become new > aggregate FRBR works because a new introduction or commentary has been > added. As Jonathan notes, users think of "Hamlet" as one work, not hundreds.
The thing is, we should NOT have to "set aside the 'workness'" of anything we handle. On the cataloging side, the ONLY limitation we have is the imagination and priorities of the developers/vendors of the systems we use. In an intelligently-designed system, it should be very simple to create the work/expression data automatically when cataloging a manifestation (in the case of a manifestation representing a unique work/expression), or to supply automatically the work/expression data and prompt the cataloger to supply just the data unique to the manifestation (in the case of a manifestation representing a pre-existing work/expression). At the beginning of my professional life 25 years ago, I was reading about "expert cataloging systems" that were soon to be part of our world. I have never actually seen anything that was more than extremely rudimentary. However, I refuse to believe that powerful cataloging systems are technically beyond our reach. But I DO believe that they are beyond what the vendors seem to be willing to develop; the tools for cataloging staff are just not sexy enough for them to waste their time on. (My god, we can't even get a certain big-name vendor to provide us something as ridiculously simple, easy, and basic as providing us the bib record ID in a selectable field in the cataloging client!) And of course on the end-user side, as countless others have pointed out, the work/expression/manifestation hierarchy should not have to be evident at all to a user in order to function well in a catalog. Kevin M. Randall Principal Serials Cataloger Bibliographic Services Dept. Northwestern University Library 1970 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-2300 email: k...@northwestern.edu phone: (847) 491-2939 fax: (847) 491-4345
