Saturday – Sunday, 24 – 25 Feb

Lakoff, George. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chaps 6-8.

Sunday, 25 Feb

Vizine-Goetz, Diane. 2004. “Terminology services: Making knowledge organization schemes more accessible to people and computers.” OCLC Newsletter 266 (October/November/December). Available online from http://www.oclc.org/news/publications/newsletters/oclc/2004/266/ in either pdf (PDF:181K/1p.) or html formats.

Vizine-Goetz, Diane, Carol Hickey, Andrew Houghton, and Roger Thompson. 2004. “Vocabulary Mapping for Terminology Services.” Journal of Digital Information, 4,4 (March), article no. 272, 2004-03-11. Available online at: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i04/Vizine-Goetz/

Gardner, Tracy. 2001. “An Introduction to Web Services.” Ariadne Issue 29. October 2001. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al.

Zeng, Marcia L. and Lois Mai Chan. 2004. “Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55 (5): 377-395. Cited by Vizine-Goetz, et al.

Olson, Hope A. The Power to name: Locating the limits of subject representation in libraries.

Began this; read through 1st half of Chap. 3 (long chapter). For fun.

This quickly became not-fun. I am writing about this is a separate post after quitting 100+ pages in.

Monday, 26Feb

Chaps. 9 – 10 of Lakoff.

Gilreath, Charles T. (1992) “Harmonization of terminology – An overview of principles.” International Classification 19 (3): 135-139. Cited by Zeng & Chan.

Tuesday, 27 Feb

Olson, Hope A. and Dennis B. Ward. (2003) “Mundane standards, everyday technologies, equitable access.” In McIlwaine, I. C., Subject retrieval in a networked environment: Proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH 14-16 August 2001 and sponsored by the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section, the IFLA Information Technology Section and OCLC. München: K. G. Saur. 50-58.

Wednesday, 28 Feb

Olson, Hope A. (2001) “Sameness and difference: A cultural foundation of classification.” Library Resources & Technical Services 45 (3):115-122.

Re-read. More on this in another post.

Le Boeuf, Patrick. (2001) “FRBR and further.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 32 (4): 15-52.

Good article discussing various international critiques and suggestions to improve and extend FRBR. Almost all of the many sources are available online. Thanks to Tom Dousa for suggesting this to me.

Thursday, 1 Mar

FRBR, Final Report. Chaps. 5 – 7, “Relationships,” “User Tasks,” and “Basic Requirements for National Bibliographic Records.” [pdf]

I read portions of this and skimmed others over lunch. It had me highly confused as it talks about obtaining a manifestation. See Lee, Renear and Smith below for more.

Thursday – Friday, 1 – 2 Mar

Chaps. 11 – 12 of Lakoff.

Friday, 2 Mar

Fallgren, Nancy J. (2007) “Users and uses of bibliographic data: Background paper for the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.” [Lorcan Dempsey.

Weinberger, David. “Taxonomy out of the box.” (IA Column) ASIST Bulletin Feb/Mar 2007. Probably not worth the (small) effort to read.

Friday – Saturday, 2 -3 Mar

Four Danish libraries. “The hybrid library: from the user’s perspective.” pdf – English February 2006, issued in English September 2006.

Very interesting from many perspectives! Unfortunately, it has a very small sample and is thus not generalizable. They intend to do a follow-up quantitative study, but if it is out I do not believe it is in English yet. Worth watching for. Lots of things in here that go counter to much of the “new” librarianship; maybe an artifact of Danish higher ed, or the small sample size, or the fact that much of the statements used to justify the new views comes primarily from surveys and librarians’ views of the matter.

Saturday, 3 Mar

Lee, Jin Ha, Alln Renear and Linda Smith. “Known-item search: Variations on a concept.” In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43, Austin (US). Retrieved from E-LIS 3 March 2007.

Saturday evening while at the LEEP Dinner I was complaining to Allen Renear that FRBR seemed to blow it in the last few chapters as they talk about obtaining a manifestation and skip items completely. His ever generous self suggested it was perhaps inadequate editing and not a mistake, and suggested I read this article because he didn’t think they made that conceptually confused claim. [My words, not Allen's!]

Or, at least, I think this is the article he referred to. ‘Twould be funny indeed, based on the content of this article, if it wasn’t the “known-item” I was, in fact, looking for. So as soon as got home I found this article online, printed it out and read it.

Well, they are much clearer about it. Items, or an item, is the thing being obtained.

I have gone back and looked at the FRBR chapters and perhaps it is mostly editing, although I still think they have some muddled concepts. In Chap. 6 on “User Tasks,” [Section 6.2.4 Obtain an Entity] they talk about obtaining manifestations and items, and note that obtain is not applicable to works and expressions.

In Chap. 7 on “Basic Requirements for National Bibliographic Records,” at the end of Section 7.1 they do mention, “It should be noted that inasmuch as the recommendations in this chapter relate to records created for listing in a national bibliography and such records normally do not reflect data pertaining to the item, the user tasks related to the item are not addressed” (98).

OK, maybe went past that note a bit too fast the first time; explains why there is no chart about obtaining an item. I still have issues with obtaining a manifestation. I think it has to do with the muddled FRBR explanation of manifestations and items as physical. Manifestations are not physical in the same sense as items. The items in a manifestation [elements in a set] are physical; leaving aside the issue of fully electronic items at the moment. But the manifestation qua manifestation is a fully abstract conceptual entity. There simply is nothing physical about a manifestation. There is a level of abstraction that the FRBR report glosses over in several places. I could, as always, be wrong, but I think this is one of the most confusing points for people who want and/or need to understand FRBR.

Lee, Renear and Smith state the case far more clearly, although I am changing their “searching for” to “obtaining”:

• (a) …obtaining a particular copy (e.g., one desired for its scribal marginalia, provenance, or the passport used as a bookmark and forgotten).
• (b) …obtaining a copy which exemplifies a particular manifestation (e.g., the 1851 NY Scribner’s edition).
• (c) …obtaining a copy which exemplifies any manifestation that embodies a particular expression (e.g., say the emended text of the 1851 edition).
• (d) obtaining a copy which exemplifies any manifestation that embodies any expression of a particular work (e.g., Moby Dick) (10-11).

Maybe this reads less well narratively, but it far more ontologically clear. And if we are going to try and impose entity-relationship diagrams on the everyday librarian (or anyone else) then ontological clarity is of the utmost importance.

So, in the end, I think the FRBR committee probably full well understand what they are trying to say, they just aren’t saying it very well. They are probably trying to keep the document as narratively simple as possible so more people will read it and perhaps internalize it, but this only leads to confusion. Clarity should not be sacrificed for simplicity.

Except in some odd cases, most of which I am not ready to spend time elucidating yet, there simply is no obtaining of a manifestation, at least not in libraries.