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frbr and music recordings
31 Jan 08
I’ve been reading skimming Bryant’s Music Librarianship: A Practical Guide, specifically the chapters on cataloguing and classification. This is in connection with a larger project that I’ve only mentioned here in passing. Perhaps one day I’ll articulate it fully, although my sense of what I’d like to do is still evolving to an extent.
At any rate, there’s not a lot in Bryant yet that I feel want specifically to make notes on. He has a separate chapter on recordings, which is my area of interest, and so doesn’t discuss them in detail in the chapters I’ve skimmed. He makes the case, I think convincingly, that music materials are different from normal monographs and serials, presenting their own set of challenges. And although Bryant’s book is getting a little old (the second edition I’m reading was 1985; the first, 1959), I find myself anticipating FRBR.
For the most part, library cataloguing practices are based on use. That’s to say that historically we have developed our catalogues based on direct experience, describing actual items in hand. You might say this is a bottom-up approach, building rich bibliographic resources one concrete entry at a time.
FRBR recognizes that, thanks to the historic development of our catalogues, we have learned and can apply a fairly sophisticated conceptual framework to the bibliographic universe. Sophisticated, but also relatively simple. From OCLC:
FRBR conceptualizes three groups of entities:
- Group 1 consists of the products of intellectual or artistic endeavor (e.g., publications).
- Group 2 comprises those entities responsible for intellectual or artistic content (a person or corporate body).
- Group 3 includes the entities that serve as subjects of intellectual or artistic endeavor (concept, object, event, and place).
The internal subdivision of Group One entities is important as well. FRBR specifies that intellectual or artistic products include the following types of entities:
- the work, a distinct intellectual or artistic creation
- the expression, the intellectual or artistic realization of a work
- the manifestation, the physical embodiment of an expression of a work
- the item, a single exemplar of a manifestation.
FRBR also specifies particular relationships between classes of Group One entities:
- a work is realized through one or more expressions
- — each of which is embodied in one or more manifestations
- — — each of which is exemplified by one or more items.
It’s at the end here, with the work – expression – manifestation – item relationships, that things get a little weird. In part, this is because for most “group one entities” the distinction between expression and manifestation is unclear. Shakespeare is often used as an example. Let’s do it bottom-up: we have in our library a number of items called “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for whom an entity named “Shakespeare” is responsible. These items represent various editions by various publishers, and we would say that these editions are equivalent to manifestations. Now here’s where it gets tricky: if the edition is a manifestation, what would be considered an expression? Well, in this case, all these various print editions are most likely to be considered manifestations of a single expression, which might be called “Midsummer Night’s Dream as a play”. Seems redundant, I agree, but of course I chose this play for a reason: “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is also an opera, and this opera (based on the play) can be considered a different expression of the same work. So to reiterate from the top, down: Midsummer Night’s Dream is a work that has (at least) two expressions, “play” and “opera”. The expression “play” finds its embodiment in numerous manifestations in the various editions compiled and published over the years, and each of these manifestations is exemplified by any number of copies, or items.
Now it seems to me music materials lend themselves quite nicely to FRBR. Adaptations and alternate arrangements are common, and Bryant spends considerable energy discussing the challenges of cataloguing them. FRBR seems an elegant and simple solution, where each adaptation is viewed as an expression.
But the other thing that makes music materials fit nicely with FRBR is the work (pardon the pun) that has been done establishing authoritatively the identity of the works of the major composers. Take, for example, the works of Bach by BWV number, or Mozart by Koechel (or Köchel; you see how quickly things get tricky with music description). It’s almost as though the FRBR notion of “work” was borrowed from music.
Now if only there were a universal authority database for musical works. Then, when, cataloguing a music item, you could simply point to the work and get on with your day. For now, I guess we have the {deep breath} Indexes to the established titles, variant titles, obsolete uniform titles, and work numbers in the Library of Congress Name-Authority File for the works of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Telemann.
Posted by pzed on January 31, 2008 at 11.58am
Categories: libraries, music
