UNSOLITICITED ESSAY EXCERPT #1.

In celebration of my completion of the 703, Organization of Knowledge midterm, I am posting one of the essays I wrote. FRBR, a conceptual model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (the acronym stands for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), has been the most interesting aspect of this class. By far.



Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, or FRBR, proposes a model for describing relationships among materials found in what Barbara Tillett refers to as "the bibliographic universe." Tillett acted as a consultant to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Study Group that developed FRBR. According to Tillett, FRBR offers a "more precise vocabulary to help future cataloging rule makers and system designers."

One component of that precise vocabulary addresses the usage of words like "book," "edition," "work," and "item." Before FRBR, these words were often used interchangeably, though their precise meanings as they were used in specific instances might vary considerably. The "entity" model of FBRR attempts to address this lack of clarity.

To begin with, FRBR proposes, all materials that appear in the bibliographic universe start at the level of conceptual content. Before words or musical notes are put to paper, before film is shot, before something is recorded, there is an idea. FRBR refers to this idea as the material's work. This work entity doesn't exist in a material sense, but only as something within the mind of its creator or creators. Nevertheless, the work entity is often the fundamental level from which many materials emanate.

Let us examine, for the sake of example, the work of Walter Tevis, author of The Hustler and The Color of Money. In addition to these novels, Tevis devised a story about an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to help save his water-deprived home planet. He called his idea, or his work, The Man Who Fell to Earth.

The next entity, according to FRBR, deals with the point at which ideas are put to paper. When a work is put into specific language, or a film is shot, or music is recorded, and thus an idea becomes fully realized, it is referred to as an expression.

In our example, when Walter Tevis completed his novel and called it The Man Who Fell to Earth, he created an expression of his work. But an expression might also be referred to as any interpretation of an original idea. It does not, for example, have to originate from the same creator. In 1976, the film director Nicholas Roeg began shooting a film adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Roeg's film is another expression of the same work. Furthermore, before the film was shot, Paul Mayersberg wrote a screenplay adaptation of Tevis' novel, and this screenplay is also an expression.

At the level of expression, a work becomes realized. In order to be accessed by the general public, an expression must be embodied by a manifestation. A manifestation is a publication, or edition, or release of an expression. As is the case with a work or its expression, a manifestation is an abstract concept. A person who seeks out a specific edition of a novel, without the need to have any specific copy of that novel, is seeking a manifestation.

Walter Tevis' novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, for example, has been published many times since its original appearance in 1963. The edition that is currently available at Amazon, the Del Rey Impact trade paperback, is one manifestation. Likewise, Nicholas Roeg's film has been released in various media over the years, including the VHS format, laserdisc and DVD. Even within the DVD format, there exist two separate releases of the film: one by Anchor Bay Entertainment, the other by Criterion. Each of these releases represents a separate manifestation of the broader work.

It is worth noting that, in terms of the cataloging of materials for use in library systems, most bibliographic records refer to a manifestation of a work and stop there. But a manifestation, like an expression or a work, is still an abstract conceptual entity. In an online catalog maintained by a bibliographic network like ILCSO, for example, a bibliographic record for the Criterion Collection edition of Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth is only a surrogate for that manifestation, copies of which may be held in libraries throughout the system. In order to refer to a specific copy of the Criterion edition, FRBR suggests the use of the word item.

Catalogers might wish to refer to an item specifically in a bibliographic record if the material being cataloged is somehow unique. If, for example, a library owned a signed copy of the first edition of Walter Tevis' The Man Who Fell to Earth, complete with notes and marginalia written by the author, this might justify creating a record at the item level. In practical terms, this might mean adding copy specific notes in the 500 field of a MARC record.

Thus The Man Who Fell to Earth is an example of a work that has been realized through many different expressions, each of which have been released in many more manifestations. This has led to there being still many more different items with the title The Man Who Fell to Earth. By using these conceptual terms to distinguish between the many things we might mean when we refer to a "book" or a "film," we begin to address the ever-increasing amount of media, like Tevis' novel and Roeg's film, which have been produced and distributed in multiple formats. A catalog that takes into account the conceptual model proposed by FRBR might link records that would otherwise remain unconnected. Without FRBR, a user searching under the title The Man Who Fell to Earth will find dozens of matching records, one for each variant manifestation. (Or for that matter, a user searching for The Da Vinci Code in OCLC will find over 70 matching records.) In contrast, a catalog that utilizes the vocabulary proposed by FRBR, both in terms of record content and in terms of system design, has the potential to help the user with a casual interest to determine for him- or herself the entity-level at which he or she should search.