FRBR Work
Technicalities 41(5) Sept/Oct 2021: 13-16
What is a work?
This is a foundational question in bibliographic organization, and conceptualizing the catalog around this unit was a foundation for establishing Antonio Panizzi’s genius. Articulating answers to that question secured the reputations of some of our leading scholars, including Seymour Lubetzky, Patrick Wilson and Elaine Svenonius. In some ways we are in the era of Hope Olson’s The Power to Name, and new kinds of ethical cataloging that attempts to identify—and circumscribe, where necessary—sources of bias in our bibliographic products. But the era before Olson was the era of The Work, the era of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) [1] and a renewed commitment to re-establish the work as the primary organizing principle of the catalog. FRBR was published nearly a quarter of a century ago, and it was both the culmination of a period of effort to center the concept of the work, and an instigation for even more work of that kind. So, almost twenty-five years later, what do we have to show for that work…., umm, I mean effort?
Back to the original question: what is a work? A lot has been written on this topic, but I think at heart the idea of a work can be a pretty simple concept: a progenitor document and its descendants (or derivatives). For Svenonious, for whom set-making is the basic structural commitment for our systems for the organization of knowledge,
a work Wi can be defined as the set of all documents that are copies of (equivalent to) a particular document aw (an individual document chosen as emblematic of the work, normally its first instance) or related to this individual by revision, update, abridgment, enlargement or translation. In set notation this would appear as
Wi = def {x: x is a copy of awi or x is a revision, update, abidgment, enlargement or translation of awi~~}
[T]his definition is not wholly operational because it is not sufficiently constructive to identify unequivocally all documents belonging to a work set. To make such an identification, it would have to go further and specify what constitutes a revision, update, and so on, possibly in terms of character strings appearing on the documents in question.
[2]
For Svenonius, this is a little bit of a trend that she repeats elsewhere in her book. [3] She uses the formality of set theory but leaves key terms undefined. She admits it, clauses such as “and so on” and “possibly in terms of…” indicate the full definition is not quite present. The formality of set theory here is a rhetorical device to precisely define a concept, and the indeterminate clauses contradict that work. If we felt “well, we can complete that work later” such a move would be completely understandable as we deferred to the building of consensus around these issues, and further elaboration would likely be lengthy and fatiguing and probably not particularly edifying.
But I think the real problem here is covered up by Svenonius’ argument. The deferral of the definition is not because it is wearisome but because it is impossible. There are simply too many examples—in the world of text, art, music, etc.—to determine definitively whether something is a descendant of a previous work, and thereby set a general rule that resolves every case. Or, more precisely, there are too many examples where people will disagree if we are looking at a new work or something derivative.
I think expertise and precision play a role here. In my prosaic quotidian life, I do not worry too much about which edition of Shakespeare I am reading (or viewing, etc.). But for a scholar who has dedicated their life to resolving problems of textual identity in Shakespeare, and for whom every variant is significant, conflating two editions might be treated as a felony. By what rule do we declare things to be equivalent or different or similar but related? OK, I know I broke a FRBR rule there, eliding from a difference between works and between editions, but that equivalent/distinct/similar distinction rests at every level of FRBR’s WEMI (work, expression, manifestation, and item) hierarchy, not to mention distinguishing amongst relationships. There are minor differences that we ignore. And there are minor differences that force us to consider creating a new bibliographic record.
What is in the Work Set?
There are two issues here. In Svenonius terms, there is the problem of what is in the work set, that is, whether something expresses the same work as some other text. The other problem is how to order the members of the work set. Let us take up the first issue in this column; the second issue involves a lot of discussion about access points and we will address that issue in a future column. For today, let us concentrate on what is a work, especially as it is used in our current standards.
Svenonius and FRBR cast the net wide to include a lot of derivative forms within their definition of the work, but if a revision “involves a significant degree of independent intellectual or artistic effort”, [4] then we have a new work, albeit one that should be related to the original work. Thus, adaptations and parodies are new works. Lord of the Rings (the book) and Lord of the Rings (the film) are separate works. Two editions, same work. Annotated edition, new work. But you know in practice some of these will provoke varying interpretations—how extensive are those annotations? Going back to principle does not help. It is that phrase “significant degree”. What qualifies as significant new intellectual content? Second editions often contain substantial new content, but they are the same work. Performing a piece of printed music can involve substantial artistic talent, but we treat the performance merely as a new expression level entity without the substantial artistic content that is required to establish it as a new work. Do you want to tell Sir Georg Solti (well, while he was alive) that his work was mere performance and did not involve substantial artistic effort? I mean, they made him a knight for his contributions to music, but we catalogers feel differently. I just would not want to be the person to say it to his face. He got more applause in a single night than we will ever get in our lifetimes.
Lumpers and Splitters
We are conditioned to think of minor textual variations as corruptions, errors, or trivialities, and treat such variants as insignificant and thus the works are equivalent. But as long as there are variations in the interpretation of text (and there always will be), then the textual similarity/difference argument will remain with us. With anything, to tell if two things are different or the same, we have to agree on the criteria of distinction, and again, that is an interpretive act, whether we are talking about species of hawthorn or editions of Hawthorn. Speaking of the evolutionary tree, Hacking says that “The DNA record does not give us a tidy tree because it encodes a lot of slightly different evolutionary histories in kindred animals, covering a very short span of recent time…. We may not end up with a tree even…. A thicket or bush, yes, but a clean-limbed tree, perhaps not.” [5] Distinguishing amongst the identical copies of a mechanically produced text may be trivial (the item problem), but typing and ordering amongst the different pressings, editions and versions of a text may be impossible to resolve because we cannot agree on the criteria of distinction. Biologists cannot agree on the number of species of hawthorn tree.
How are we to resolve the difference amongst version of the Bible, or Ode to Joy? Do we have definitive texts? Do we have definitive tests for assessing those texts? In the classification of flora and fauna, taxonomists divide themselves into “lumpers” and “splitters.” [6] And so it is with bibliographers. Personally, I am a splitter. I like to dwell amongst the minor variations that FRBR tells me are ignorable. I like to compare different performances of the same musical piece, or the different edits of a film. When I watch a new edit of Justice League, my kids groan and ask how can I stand watching that film again? I tell them there are important differences and that they are not the same film, and that I am a scholar. Except when it comes to Shakespeare, then I am a lumper. And I am a splitter when it comes to DC movies. That might be the definition of lowbrow.
Let us consider a standard Hollywood film. The typical film for global release goes through various edits to make it conform to various rating systems and the vagaries of national law. Some countries are particularly sensitive to displays of, among other things, nudity, homosexuality, drug use, violence, racial or political content, in a varying constellation of standards, particularly when rating for adolescents. The 1987 film Robocop was submitted multiple times to achieve an R rating in the United States, including a submission that removed just a few frames of film from a particularly gory scene, and only the fans at ComicCon would have noticed the difference. The 1631 edition of the Bible published by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas is known as the Wicked Bible for the omission of the word “not” in Exodus 12:14, rendering the passage “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The same printing omitted an “n” in the word “Greatnasse” at Deuteronomy 5:24, leaving “Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse.”
Things get even more complicated once we consider the interactions between the materialities of the text and the meaning of the text to produce new experiences of reading. For Robocop, the difference could be in viewing the movie in a theater versus viewing a VHS copy at home with a resolution that might have rendered the graphic violence moot. Penn & Teller’s How to Play With Your Food contained a standard gag, an unopenable packet of sugar, which was supposed to be served along with tea to an unsuspecting friend. Except in this case the packet was openable, and contained a silica gel dyed with cobalt chloride, “a potential health hazard.”7 The publisher recalled the book and swapped the envelope of poison with the intended packet. So let us talk about alternate readings, and whether one work is equivalent to the other. The ideational/textual object did not change at all, the criteria often given for defining a work. Same work, or different work? One might kill you, and was a significant legal liability.
So, this is a column on the politics of metadata and classification. In addition to varieties of classifying the various members of a work, I need to establish one additional element according the criterion laid down in my previous columns: that one community or form of knowledge is treated differently than another group. I cited Lasswell, who defined politics as “who gets what, when, how.” [8] If one group of people views the catalog as an elaborate inventory of precisely annotated bibliographic descriptions, others view it as bewildering, making distinctions when any edition will do, or they are just looking for the film.
The study group that wrote the FRBR report understood that cultural difference may be key here.
Because the notion of a work is abstract, it is difficult to define precise boundaries for the entity. The concept of what constitutes a work and where the line of demarcation lies between one work and another may in fact be viewed differently from one culture to another. Consequently the bibliographic conventions established by various cultures or national groups may differ in terms of the criteria they use for determining the boundaries between one work and another. [9]
I have a personal predilection for cultural explanations, and I agree there may be a national cultural difference here. We should invetigate—it should matter for a global standard promulgated by an international body. But the difference between lumpers and splitters may be between different kinds of users. In fact I support characterizing different user groups as communities, and subject to cultural difference, though that is non-standard nomenclature.
So let us add the problem of the definition of the work to our pile of questions regarding the politics of bibliographic organization and knowledge organization. More to come…
Works Cited
1. IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report. Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1998).
2. Svenonius, Elaine. The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), page 37.
3. See, for example, Svenonius pp. 45-46.
4. FRBR, p. 18.
5. Hacking, Ian. "Root and Branch." Nation285, no. 10 (Oct. 8, 2007): 25-30.
6. McKusick, Victor A. “On Lumpers and Splitters, or the Nosology of Genetic Disease.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 12, no. 2 (1969): 298-312. doi:10.1353/pbm.1969.0039.
7. "A Gag Gone Wrong: Don’t Pass the Sugar."AP News (December 10, 1992). Accessed July 15, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/4511ef34f1c78bb800d6270495998ccb.
8. Lasswell, Harold D. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York, London: Whittlesey House, 1936).
9. FRBR, p. 17.