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<font size=3>I would earnestly recommend against this interpretation of
"expression", though I understand John's reasoning.<br><br>
"Work" and "expression" are <i>critical</i> terms
involving categorization of contents. Critical judgement must be brought
to bear on the observed contents, which ultimately requires making
inferences about the variations inherent or historically likely among
artifacts produced by particular processes.<br><br>
"Edition", "issue", and "state" are the
<i>technical</i> terms by which we class printed artifacts as
manufactured products. They are critically neutral terms (with some grey
area in the determination of "issue" <i>v</i>.
"state"--though even here the problem almost always concerns
distribution channels for the finished product based on analysis of
paratextual content, rather than textual content <i>per se</i>). They are
thus confined to the dimension of manifestation, as a <i>basis</i> upon
which to exercise the critical judgement brought to bear on
"work" and "expression". (This is a really broad
statement--if an extended argument is desired, I suppose it could serve
as the basis for the 2003 iteration of the RBS Advanced Descriptive
Bibliography course, God help me.)<br><br>
FRBR is a useful but very broad set of terms, of great value in large
part because of its generality with respect to format. Even at the level
of cataloging, however--as opposed to bibliography--it cannot be applied
directly, without a certain degree of format-specific expertise, which
may very well need to be expressed in a format-specific vocabulary. I
have found the FRBR terms to be of great use in organizing my own
thoughts concerning the bibliographical relationships that concern
textual and historical scholarship, and in considering the analogues of
those relationships with respect to other formats (original recording,
reformatted recording, re-mixed recording, sampled recording, pressing,
re-issue, etc., for example).<br><br>
Unfortunately (given the critical stew that bubbles away among our
humanities users, at least), there is no way to analyze these
relationships without some recourse to authorial, post-authorial,
anti-authorial, pseudo-collaborative (etc. etc.--maybe sometimes random)
intentionality, and understanding of technical processes and their
vagaries as a mere complication of the evidence, all of which may involve
some difficulty in determining what is at issue in a given case. We have
at least to keep our analytical tools reasonably well-honed, however, or
difficulty will inevitably deliquesce into incoherence.<br><br>
At any rate, I don't think Tanselle can have meant quite what John
implies here. One edition can be very much like another--they can be, as
Pollard (I think) said, as alike as peas, though not as alike as buttons.
At any rate, the basis for determining edition has nothing whatever to do
with intentionality: it may turn out upon analysis that two editions do
differ by intention, but only at that point do we begin to ask ourselves
about different "expressions". (The interesting thing for me,
actually, is that bibliography has had no good terms to express the
dimension of "work" and "expression"; it has,
however, a very good vocabulary---not always well deployed--for
expressing the variables of "manifestation", and even for
"item" in the determination of "ideal copy", though
the possible confusion of the critical and technical dimensions here
under discussion is all the muddier for the existence of that unfortunate
term, I suspect).<br><br>
I am now especially dismayed that the Exhibition Awards Committee
meetings exactly overlap BSC. Any chance of throwing together an informal
discussion of FRBR at Midwinter? It takes a ghastly amount of time to
compose these messages. I think better on my feet than I do on my butt. -
Richard<br><br>
At 12/6/02 04:55 PM, John Attig wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>In terms of cataloging rules for
hand-printed books, we need to decide whether "change of
content" in the FRBR use of the term means only significant and/or
intentional changes, or whether -- in the special case of hand-printed
books -- any resetting of type is by definition a new expression. I
don't think it would be difficult to make a case for the latter; it is
certainly the basis of the definition of "edition" in the
current DCRB (based on a definition by Tanselle). Personally, I
find this to be more in keeping with traditional bibliographic treatment
of hand-printed books. On the other hand, it would be possible to
justify the former interpretation on the grounds of similarity to how we
handle machine-printed books.</blockquote>
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<br>
RICHARD NOBLE : RARE BOOKS CATALOGER : JOHN HAY LIBRARY : BROWN
UNIVERSITY<br>
PROVIDENCE, RI 02912 : 401-863-1187/FAX 863-2093 :
RICHARD_NOBLE@BROWN.EDU</font></html>