Defining Resourcesfor Description

What is it?

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What is it?

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What is it?Is it•Art?•A painting?•An image?•A JPEG?•A digital file?•A still life?•An Italian painting?•A group of volumetric forms?•A high-quality digitization?•Something to put on the wall?•Something that haunts me?•Something yellowish?

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What is it?

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What is it?

Is it•A plant?•A vegetable?•A weed?•Turnip greens?•A good source of Vitamin A?•A good source of antioxidants? •Food?•Dinner? •An ingredient?•A crop?•A regional speciality of the Southern United States? •A photograph?

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What is it?

Yes, it’s a still life by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and a bunch of turnip greens. (Or, really, representations of those things.)

But the salient identity can vary.

The salient identity both determines and is defined by a context.

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Antelopes

An antelope in a zoo is different from an antelope on the savanna because our interest in it is different.

In the zoo, an antelope is a representative of its species that informs the public about matters of ecology, zoology, and so on. In this way, it is a document just like a zoology textbook or a specimen in a natural history museum.

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Identity membership

When is something an acceptable instance of a particular identity class?

Some identities are easy to establish. Some are not. Some appear to be easy but reveal themselves to be otherwise.

Our conceptual categories are often graded; turnip greens are more easily defined as vegetables than parsley.

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Centrality and peripherality

When determining how to specify identity, it can be useful to consider central and peripheral members of the imagined set.

If the painting is a still life, then what might be the most “still lifey” of still lifes that we can contemplate? What are borderline still lifes? Can we use this comparison to figure out the characteristics that might be necessary or at least important?

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Why bother?

Why fret about identity classes and acceptable instances and whether parsley is a vegetable?

Can’t we just let everyone tag everything, no matter what it might be?

Let everything be everything and anything at all times!

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Precision!

If we want greens for dinner, we probably don’t want parsley, or the weeds growing in the yard, or iceberg lettuce, or even cabbage. (Or do we?)

If we are studying still life paintings, we probably don’t want to retrieve photographs, or portraits with a bottle in them, or someone’s art class imitation of a Morandi. (Or do we?)

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Understanding!

Declaring a salient identity for an instance tells us something about that item, or about our interest in it; the relationship structure of potential instances in that entity set tells us something as well.

Antelopes become documents when they are put into an information system (the zoo). The system frames its contents with a particular interpretive lens.

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The bibliographic universe

Information resources have certain properties that distinguish them from other kinds of identity classes, such as:

•They have “content.”

•They are “about” something.

•They have “creators” (often).

Most of the reading for this week was specifically about entities in the bibliographic, or information, universe.

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The bibliographic universe

The set of resources that we most commonly store, describe, and make accessible in libraries and other information systems.

We might say that a straightforward entity in the bibliographic universe is the book. But when we say book, what exactly do we mean?

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Wilson’s bibliographic universe

Wilson’s idea of the bibliographic universe involves the following types of related entities:

• Works.

• Texts.

• Exemplars.

Bibliographic control involves our ability to manipulate this universe to find the best material for our needs.

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Exemplars

According to Wilson, an exemplar is a particular “copy” or “performance” in which a specific “sequence of words and auxiliary symbols” is expressed. Exemplars might be:

• A particular physical copy of a book.

• A recitation of a poem.

• The filmed performance of a play.

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Texts

According to Wilson, a text is the “sequence of words and arbitrary symbols” that an exemplar puts into physical form. While a single text can be expressed in a variety of forms, the text itself is an “abstract entity” without physicality. Examples of texts include:

• The sequence of words and symbols that makes up Wilson’s chapter “The Bibliographic Universe.”

• The sequence of words and symbols that constitutes the folio version of Macbeth.

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Works

According to Wilson, the work is a “group or family of texts.” However, the extent of this family is not easy to determine. Examples of works:

• “The Bibliographic Universe” and its translation into French (er, if it is a strict translation).

• The combined set of editions of the Chicago Manual of Style.

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One work or multiple works?

• Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” (beginning “I, too, dislike it”) was revised multiple times by the author over 40 years, in varying lengths of 30, 29, 13, and 3 lines.

• According to my friend Trent, Hans Gabler’s 1984 edition of Ulysses is an “abomination” and not to be dignified as part of the same work.

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Why care about works?

In some sense the work is the level of abstraction that comes most readily to mind when we consider many forms of intellectual creation. We may not know that multiple texts (or versions) exist, but we know that we want Hamlet.

If the catalog shows us all the texts and exemplars that make up the work, we can decide which we want. Or we can just pick any exemplar if the distinctions don’t matter.

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Non-textual materials in Wilson’s bibliographic universe

For Wilson, images and music are not part of the bibliographic universe, although there “is no sharp boundary” between the pictorial and musical universes and the bibliographic one.

Wilson makes this distinction because images and music seem to require different types of attributes than writings. What does it mean for a picture or musical work to have a subject, for example?

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Documents or information?

Is the idea of a bibliographic universe outmoded? Should we instead be thinking about the information universe?

Wilson says that documents are often useful or interesting in ways that transcend the information they contain.

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Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)

FRBR is an entity-relationship model to describe the bibliographic universe, developed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA).

FRBR is meant to model a user view of bibliographic entities and be independent of any particular metadata implementation.

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FRBR entity-relationship model

FRBR entities include works, expressions, manifestations, and items.

Chart from Tillet, 2004

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FRBR works

A work in the FRBR model is similar to the work described by Wilson: “a distinct intellectual or artistic creation.” FRBR examples of works:

• All editions of an anatomy textbook are one work.

• A Bach organ fugue and an arrangement for chamber orchestra are the same work.

• A French movie in its original form and a version with English subtitles (and one dubbed into Japanese) are the same work.

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FRBR expressions

An expression in FRBR is similar to Wilson’s text: “the intellectual or artistic realization of a work” in a form, be it textual, sound, image, musical notation, whatever. The expression encompasses the intellectual but not the physical form (e.g., typeface and layout are not part of the expression). Examples of expressions:

• The score and performances of a quintet.

• A German text and its English translation.

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FRBR manifestations

A manifestation in FRBR is the realization of an expression in a physical medium. The same expression can be embodied in different manifestations. All copies that are produced as part of the same set are the same manifestation. Examples of manifestations:

• The same performance of a musical work on CD and on LP (two manifestations, one expression).

• The same edition of a newspaper in print and in microform (two manifestations, one expression).

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FRBR items

An item in FRBR refers to the actual physical copy of a manifestation. Examples of items:

• A particular autographed copy of a book.

• A particular copy of a musical score in which one page is missing.

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Attributes and entities in FRBR

Each entity has a different set of attributes.

Some attributes are similar: works and expressions both have titles. (The title of a work, under which expressions are grouped, might be Hamlet, but the title of a particular expression might be William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.)

Some attributes are completely different. Manifestations have publishers. Works don’t.

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FRBR in action: Austlit

One of the few systems that uses the FRBR entities (although it doesn’t call them that) is Austlit, the Australian Literature Resource.

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Identity and identifiers

Identity: Secret History of the Kelly Gang

(The entity set is the work Secret History of the Kelly Gang; all instances are versions of that work)

Identifier:

•An integer (if expression is the instance)

•An ISBN number (if manifestation is the instance)

•A call number (if item is the instance)

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Summary

• When we speak of entities, we are defining a salient identity for a set of potential instances.

• The salient identity reveals the nature of our interest in the entity set; it is motivated by a purpose.

• Characterizing central and peripheral members of an entity set can help us to determine necessary or important attributes for the set, or to define (artificial) set boundaries.

• The bibliographic universe is particularly unruly: it is difficult to systematically define and relate the products of intellectual creation.