On 06/01/2012 20:34, J. McRee Elrod wrote:
<snip>
James Weinheimer said:
Probably, the issue of aggregates is also more related to physical materials
than to virtual resources.
Absolutely not. While we first encountered the aggregate work problem with
papers given at continuing education symposia, we now encounter
it with constituent parts of websites.
Many electronic publishers have parts of their websites for particular series,
subjects, types of users, etc.
</snip>
But if it is just the conference papers etc., everything can be handled
as they have always been done, as you point out.
What I meant was that with physical materials, it is much easier to know
what actually is the "aggregating entity" because you are looking at a
book with lots of conference papers, the journal issue with different
articles, and so on. From my experience, it is much more difficult for
the cataloger to discover precisely what is, or is not, part of the same
website, especially if you are looking at specific parts. The webmaster
of the specific site knows this much better than anyone else.
I am still trying to find better examples, but here are a couple that
should illustrate it. You may catalog an electronic document such as
this
http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-09192010-154127/unrestricted/dissertation.pdf,
but you remain completely unaware that it is actually part of this:
http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-09192010-154127/. Many
times because of the structure of the site, you are looking at a
specific article or section, and there is no indication that the item is
part of a series.
Here's another example: http://www.spunk.org/texts/intro/sp000281.txt,
is actually part of "The Spunk Library" http://www.spunk.org/, but you
would not know it except through creatively playing with the URL.
Frame sites (i.e. using the <frameset> or <iframe> coding) can be
especially confusing, since it can turn out that you are only looking at
one part of a whole. Here is an example. You see this page and
everything looks OK
http://www.gooddocuments.com/philosophy/skimming_m.htm, but it is
actually designed to be seen in this way:
http://www.gooddocuments.com/philosophy/skimming.htm.
With printed materials, the "aggregating entity" will almost always be
much more obvious but online, can easily be hidden. And, to return to
dynamically-created mashups, while it may be theoretically possible to
catalog them according to FRBR, to do so in reality would be more
tedious than finding needles in a haystack and probably not worth the
effort.
So, in a case of an online conference with multiple papers (all
virtual), the current methods can be used. But the methods can fall
apart for many materials online.
--
*James Weinheimer* weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
*First Thus* http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
*Cooperative Cataloging Rules*
http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
