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"With some 50% of resources and 77% of work clusters in WorldCat identified as singletons ...."

It would be interesting to see how "singletons" are defined in the OCLC report.

1) Do they refer to bibliographic entities based on (non-conflicting) manifested work titles (i.e., 100/110/111+ title portion of 245 or, the title portion of a single 245)?

2) Are compilations included in this category (i.e., a trilogy, an exhibition catalog (with artist(s) in 700s), an aggregate of several novels either by a single author or by several  authors, etc.)?

One would assume that most of these 50-70% resources were cataloged under AACRII. Would it be more helpful and instructive, for the sake of comparison and analysis, to compile a similar set of stats drawn from OCLC based on cataloging data after RDA was implemented, especially in the last two years?

Yang
PUL

From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ed Jones
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2017 3:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCCLIST] Should a Work description be generated for every cataloged resource? (Question from the PCC SCS/LDAC Task Group on the Work Entity)

The PCC SCS/LDAC Task Group on the Work Entity has been charged with producing a white paper to give a high-level outline of the issues surrounding the identification of work entities (PCC Vision, Mission, and Strategic Directions, 2015-2017, action 3.3). To that end, we are soliciting PCC community feedback on a number of questions relating to the Work entity. These questions, along with some background, will be presented one at a time over the next several weeks. Our goal is to trigger and lively and thoughtful discussion that will help us in our deliberations. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. We are most interested in hearing well thought out arguments on either side.

The first question is this:

Should a Work description be generated for every cataloged resource?

BACKGROUND:

As a top-down hierarchical model, FRBR requires a Work entity for every cataloged resource, functioning as the main clustering mechanism for relating Expressions and Manifestations, even when there is only a single Manifestation of a single Expression of a single Work (historically, the most common condition).  However, in a more fluid and egalitarian Linked Data graph model, a Work description--analogous to a Work authority record--is not needed for every resource, even though elements of the FRBR Work entity, such as relationships with Creators and Subjects, will be part of the resource description.  By its very nature, a graph model is intended to be flexible and therefore less accommodating to the hierarchical structure of FRBR than, e.g., XML.  The linked data graph model allows relationships to be made among resources without a superimposed structure and enables related resource clusters to emerge more organically from the data.

Experiments by OCLC with legacy bibliographic data make a compelling data-based argument for generating FRBR Work entity graphs only when they are warranted.  With some 50% of resources and 77% of work clusters in WorldCat identified as singletons, and in a community that is always seeking workflow economies, generating a work graph for every resource seems neither economical nor scalable in an RDF environment. From that perspective, it may be advisable to institute a best practice to create work graphs only when the resource in hand is not a singleton. However, whether this would be a decision made by the cataloger or by an automated background process would need to be determined. In addition, the actual stored data might be different from the catalog view. What is needed today is to explore the cataloging workflow and the user services that the catalog should provide as a way to provide a set of goals for the technical development.

In the FRBR conceptual model, attributes that are predictably shared among all the Manifestations of a Work belong to the Work description rather than the several Manifestation descriptions, such as Creators and Subjects.  A best practice that does not require creation of a Work for singletons would involve a change to current cataloging practice.  If there were no requirement to create a Work description for every resource, then the properties common to multiple Manifestations that are currently included in a  Work description would have to be modeled for inclusion in Manifestation description as well.

We look forward to a lively discussion.

Ed Jones
Chair, PCC SCS/LDAC Task Group on the Work Entity