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BIBFRAME  December 2013

BIBFRAME December 2013

Subject:

Re: BIBFRAME Digest - 9 Dec 2013 to 10 Dec 2013 (#2013-193)

From:

Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

[log in to unmask]

Date:

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 08:59:42 -0800

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On 12/11/13, 1:36 PM, Murray, Ronald wrote:
> I think that the muddle comes from decomposing a resource description one step too far - and then not being clear about which "observational frame of reference"/POV is the source of a given descriptive fragment. Work-level descriptions should not specify physical characteristics of (one or more) resource(s). Item-level descriptions should not concern themselves with intellectual content.

Ron,

The "book v. content" debate has had a very long history in library 
cataloging -- from Panizzi onward. It's pretty clear that you can't 
separate the two "in real life." What I hold in my hand has to be both. 
But in terms of description, which is a construct, what is "thing" and 
what is "content" is not easy to define, and in particular it will be 
different for different forms. The presence or absence of color (e.g. 
colored illustrations) probably doesn't change the meaning of a book and 
can be considered to be a non-intellectual component, but it can be the 
main "content" of a painting.

It is for this reason that having all properties assigned to one and 
only one defined entity (whether the FRBR 4 or the BIBFRAME 2) may not 
work, or may force some materials to be cataloged in ways that are 
detrimental to their description. (square peg/round hole)

This rigidity also doesn't make it easy to provide different points of 
view for different audiences. There's no such thing as a universal view 
of, say, a movie. For a non-sighted person, a movie has no visuals: the 
sound (with audio captioning for action) is the whole thing; for a deaf 
person there is no sound, but there are visuals and text (visual 
captioning).  The role of the music that accompanies a movie is vastly 
different for those audiences.

I am beginning to understand the frustration of the nonbook catalogers. 
It does seem that the cataloging rules (and thus the cataloging record 
format) are developed a priori, primarily with textual materials in 
mind, then an attempt has to be made to fit everything else into them. 
Maybe we need a cataloging hack fest where we experiment with different 
views of a wide variety of materials, no holds barred, and then see 
about developing something out of what results from that.

kc

>
> Lacking a useful set of defined (probably complementary) reference frames - and lacking an answer to the question: "what point of view is being represented by this descriptive fragment?" yon fragments presently get swept up in the baleen called a Annotation. Introspect a bit as you consider an annotation and see if you can imagine a reference frame it belongs to. No luck? Maybe the Bibliographic Universe it trying to tell you something. Try grounded theory:
>
>      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory
>
> Ron Murray
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
> Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 4:01 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] BIBFRAME Digest - 9 Dec 2013 to 10 Dec 2013 (#2013-193)
>
> Although Simon's statements about the holdings solution were couched somewhat metaphysically, I read his analysis as being about structure, and the indirect relationship of holdings as annotation to the resource being described. The nature of this indirection means that anyone can assert holdings on the any instance, and it may be difficult to determine which of those assertions is the one you wish to take as authoritative, in particular in a shared bibliographic environment.
>
> My own concern, stated in an email long ago, had to do with structuring holdings as annotations, which which then means that the bibframe:Instance has no direct link to the holdings; the only link is from the holdings annotation to the bf:Instance. This means that one must traverse the universe of annotations, select all annotations for that Instance, and extract those that relate to holdings. In a closed environment (and one with not a lot of annotations, perhaps) this may not have any negative effect, but it seems that it should be thought through in terms of how well that works in a large, shared environment.
> Here is my email message (which, alas, solicited no reply):
>
> http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1309&L=BIBFRAME&D=0&I=-3&m=1277&P=5563
>
> I'm also concerned that as yet there is no clear definition of what steers some characteristics to the annotation method, vs. why some characteristics are considered properties of the bf:Work, bf:Instance, or bf:Authority. This may become clearer through the development process.
>
> kc
>
> On 12/11/13, 7:48 AM, Murray, Ronald wrote:
>> Physicists in the early 20th Century (especially Niels Bohr) naturally encountered issues of ultimate "knowing" that had exercised Kant et al. for so long,  and decided to bypass them in a fairly straightforward (for physicists) way.
>>
>> Bohr's point of view was that it's not the job of science to say what Nature is. Science is what we can say about nature.  Bohr asserted that physicists were better off thinking in terms of "observing systems" and "observed systems," wherein observations on phenomena are essentially answers generated by apparatus designed to ask questions of a phenomenon in a specified way.
>>
>>    Design a box that asks wave questions - and you get wave answers. Ditto particles.  Bohr's introduction of the Complementarity Principle "permitted" physicists to deal with both kinds of answers rather than insist on one or the other.^ Taking what their observing systems **said** about phenomena of interest, physicists' got moved on to the business of theory/instrument-building/experimentation.
>>
>> In our case, we can assert that members of a library/archive "observational community^^" have reached a point where we can usefully specify several *complementary* points of view that shall be applied when describing Cultural Heritage resources. We change our minds according to specification and generate statements permissible from that point of view. A Work-level POV gets you Work-level descriptions - like "Abruptness." Item-level descriptions concern themselves the physical aspects of a resource^^^, potentially including the resource's disposition in space-time.
>>
>> What if someone wants to float an observational community's POV-generated statements about Cultural Heritage resources away from observing/observed/description scenarios like the one sketched out above, and declare the statements to be a kind of disembodied knowledge? Bye-bye , Bohr...  I would be very interested in seeing how our stalwarts accomplish this.
>>
>> ^  Holton, Gerald. "The roots of complementarity." Daedalus 99, no. 4 (1970): 1015-1055.
>> ^^ Daston, Lorraine, and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds. Histories of scientific observation. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
>> ^^^ To include bounded-off regions of magnetic domains, etc. on digital storage media.
>>
>> Ron Murray
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anderson, William
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 9:01 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] BIBFRAME Digest - 9 Dec 2013 to 10 Dec 2013 (#2013-193)
>>
>> Hopefully, we won't have any metadata experts blowing their brains out over the existential angst of the ontology of knowledge (Though I quick check of Wikipedia hints at a love murder suicide).  We do not live in a Romantic age, however. (Are we Neo-Victorians of a sort?)
>>
>> No expert in BIBFRAME or philosophy (I had never heard of Vaihinger) and trying to find my way through the maze of the latter. The veracity dimension of knowledge, of course, as always been of importance (peer review and the like), but with the explosion of scholarship (and purported scholarship) beyond the realms of academia, veracity mechanisms become all the more important. Especially the case when various search mechanism are based on other criteria (popularity, the wisdom of crowds, which may or may not be good indicator of veracity, or the hand of the market)  Even with holdings statements in the traditional sense, what is true when made, might shift as items become lost, websites flicker in and out, etc.  I wonder how much of good old Worldcat's holdings statements are still true? A reasonable amount I would think, as they do serve as a powerful backbone to interlibrary loan.
>>
>>
>> Date:    Tue, 10 Dec 2013 10:20:31 +0100
>> From:    Bernhard Eversberg <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: Prolegomena To Any Future Metadata (was Re: [BIBFRAME] Bibframe plans)
>>
>> 09.12.2013 23:01, Simon Spero:
>>> Do you have any comments on the more foundational issues that I raise?
>>>
>> Immanuel Kant, in his magnum opus about "pure reason", tried to get to the ground of the question "What can we know?"
>> His answer was that there is very little, much less than had been believed all the time. That shattered many of his contemporaries very profoundly who had not quite arrived in the Age of Reason yet.
>> (The author Heinrich von Kleist is said to have committed suicide because of that.) If we now ask how much truth can be expected from holdings statements, not to speak of subject headings, we might indeed despair.
>>
>> As we've done all the time, we have to operate on useful fictions rather than established truths and tangible facts. We might subscribe to Neo-Kantian Hans Vaihinger's "Philosophy of 'As if'". Have we not always been acting as if the statements we read in our records were true? Though knowing well enough they sometimes are not.
>> This attitude runs counter, of course, to the  Zero or One, Yes or No mindset of data processing. But that can't be helped.
>> Calling our statements "assertions", therefore, we must be aware of their being less than certain in varying degrees. Like Kant's contemporaries, we may find that hard to live with, and even BIBFRAME will not relieve that, provenance statements notwithstanding. (And think what those would mean under the watchful eyes of the NSA...)
>>
>> B.Eversberg

-- 
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

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