Hello all --

 

Does anyone know of a project or a prototype that allows the end user to display / discover / navigate relationships between a work and various expressions of that work?

 

For example, let's say the work is Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.  Let's say that I have in my collection 20 editions of the book, in English and other languages; a videotape of the Disney movie; a complete run of the comic book series Petit d'homme ("Man Cub") which retells the stories in a futuristic post-apocalyptic setting; a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, inspired by The Jungle Book and with many scenes that map directly to scenes in the original; a kids’ video game in which Mowgli and other characters from the book have adventures; the libretto + music from the Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s 2006 adaptation for their Theater For Young Audiences; a 33-1/3 LP recording of the Jungle Book Cycle by composer Percy Grainger; original sketches and drawings by [some famous artist] which the artist says were inspired by the book; a copy of a Stephen King novel which includes quotes from the book; a poetry anthology entitled Jungle Rhymes for which contributors wrote original poems about, or related to, or somehow connected to the book; a book of lit crit essays on various aspects of The Jungle Book; and lots more stuff.

 

So, in this hypothetical system, there would be a record for the work: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, and there would be a record for each of these items.  There would also be relationships defined between the work and each of the items, including the nature of that relationship, for example “edition of” “adaptation of” “translation of” “is quoted in” and so on.  The end user could then look up a work and immediately see all the items related to that work, and also see exactly how they are related.

 

For those of you know FRBR, this is basically the FRBR model.  I’m wondering if anybody has mocked up or prototyped or (gasp!) implemented an end-user interface that makes those relationships visible to/navigable by the end user.

 

I did google “FRBR prototypes”, of course :) and I found a good amount of stuff on back-end systems and algorithms for creating/maintaining this data, but not so much on what it would/could look like to the end user. 

 

I did find this one: http://blazing-sunset-24.heroku.com  (may take several seconds to load).  Under "Genre" click on "Drama" and then look at the list of results (the first one is "Citizen Kane").   The work info is displayed first, followed by info about specific instantiations (or manifestations, I can't remember the right term).  This is still very linear and "list-y," though, whereas I think it would be fun to see something more graphic (info visualization rather than info list), and the type of relationship is not given, but it's still quite interesting.

Anyway, does anybody know of anything?

 

Thanks --

 

+++++++++++++++

Michele Combs

Lead Archivist

Special Collections Research Center

Syracuse University

315-443-2081

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scrc.syr.edu

library-blog.syr.edu/scrc