You _can_ do things this way, out of neccesity, but it's definitely not
preferable from a data mangement point of view, right? We're talking
about the difference between a a single 'foreign key' in each record
stating that it's part of a certain work (preferable from data
management point of view), compared to basically heuristics for guessing
from as-written-on-title-page (or as entered by a user) title/author
combinations (less preferable from data management point of view, but
possibly neccesary to avoid the expense of human data control), compared
to this idea of a "switching file" that is sort of just a
human-controlled enhancement to the heuristics (but if you're going to
spend human time doing that, why not just spend human time doing it
right, the "foreign key" approach? The "switching file" approach is to
my mind a less efficient encoding, not a more efficient one.)
On 8/7/2011 11:32 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:
Quoting James Weinheimer <weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com>:
if the purpose is to get the FRBR-type results
to show what works, expressions, manifestations and items exist. For
those records that do not have the uniform title entered, they fall
outside, and there is nothing to do except to add the uniform titles
(or URIs or whatever),
In the Open Library, where they decided to gather manifestations under
works (as usual, expression was harder to do), all it took was one
record for the manifestation to have a uniform title. I'll illustrate:
Mann, Thomas
[Der zauberberg]
Magic Mountain
Mann, Thomas
[Der zauberberg]
Montagna incantata
Mann, Thomas
Magic Mountain
Mann, Thomas
Montagna incantata
These give you the information you need to bring them together into a
single work even though some records don't have a direct link to the
work. I could imagine a kind of "switching file" with links between
original and translated titles that would remove the need for uniform
titles in the process of "work-ifying" a set of bib records. (Not
unlike OCLC's xISBN service, BTW, only based on titles not identifiers.)
Not every bit of information has to be in every record. We can have
information outside of individual bib records that helps us make
decisions or do things with the records. One of the benefits given for
FRBR is that it makes it easier for us to share this common knowledge,
and to make use of it. I think that even without a formal adoption of
FRBR we could gain efficiencies in bib record creation and system
functionality by having a place (undoubtedly on the web) where we
share this knowledge. If you look at what DBPedia is doing with
general information from Wikipedia and other resources, then you get
the idea. DBPedia is messy and rather ad hoc, but a LIBPedia could be
made up of authoritative sources only.
kc