With all due respect to the many good points that are being made, I object
to the use of the term convention, which tends to imply mindless adherence
to past practice. In fact, a great deal of thought and practice went into
the boundaries drawn between different works that can be found in the
current AACR2 rules 21.9-15, as well as comments elsewhere in that chapter
and in chapter 25. There are boundaries, much of the time fairly clear to
most of our users as well as librarians. Occasionally, however, what
differentiates one work from another is difficult to pin down, and
sometimes one can see a work going from unity to multiplicity and back
(this particularly happens with works transmitted in manuscript).
Reality, however, is complicated. Richard Smiragli wrote an excellent
book on the subject (The nature of a "work," 2001).
I used to toy with the idea of the "work" as a platonic concept, but I
really believe that FRBR is innocent of philosophy. I suppose you could
construct the epistemological presuppositions and general philosophical
view behind it, but I suspect that what you would come up with would be a
surprise to those who developed the model. If one has to talk about
mental concepts, perhaps we can get away from archetypes and forms with a
separate reality and talk about shared perceptions of common
characteristics.
As for superwork, I prefer the notion of "work family," which is used by
Smiraglia (who got it from someone whose name I forget). That metaphor is
much more flexible and accounts for some of the wild variety we see in
works (fraternal twins, step grandparents, in-laws and so on :-)).
--
Laurence S. Creider
Special Collections Librarian
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Work: 575-646-7227
Fax: 575-646-7477
lcrei...@lib.nmsu.edu
On Thu, 7 Apr 2011, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
On 4/7/2011 5:36 PM, Gene Fieg wrote:
And while I may have become a bit too Platonic (who knows?),
there is only one work here. The novel. The film and the film
script are expressions.
Apparently even AACR2 disagrees with you, or they'd get the same 'main
entry' under AACR2, which they do not, right?
How can the same work have more than one 'main entry', that doesn't make any
sense just in AACR2 language alone, does it?
Again, I think it's important to emphasize that FRBR/RDA attempt to be most
consistent with legacy practice, while formalizing and explicitly modelling
it. You can certainly disagree with how AACR2 has been modelling things for
~30 years, or legacy cataloging practice before that too -- I don't think
there's one existentially or platonically right answer, there is no way to
'experimentally' answer it by putting the book and a DVD under a microscope
or something -- but that's FRBR/RDA is not attempting to fundamentally
change AACR2's entity modelling choices, for better or worse. (Except
perhaps when AACR2's entity modelling choices become apparent as
inconsistent within themselves, once made explicit and formally modelled).
It's a convention. And the convention under both AACR2 and RDA is to
consider a genre change to be a new work, as Thomas Brenndorfer helpfully
explains referencing the actual RDA text.
