It is tempting to think that, if only the words we used to describe the contents of writings were clear and precise in meaning, the intractable difficulties of content-accessibility would vanish or be largely overcome. … But no sharpness of tools would eliminate difficulty; greater sharpness might increase difficulty. For instance, I know more or less clearly what hostility is, that is, the word “hostility” has a fairly sharp meaning for me, but far from a perfectly sharp and precise meaning. Now if I were to supply myself with an exactly defined concept, got by explication of my imprecise notion, I might find that I could never use the new concept in describing any actual piece of writing; the concept might be too sharp ever to find application. There would be instances of hostility (in the new sense) that I could recognize, but no instances of writings on hostility that I could recognize, for no one would have written on hostility (as I now would understand it). If people write on what are for them ill-defined phenomena, a correct description of their subjects must reflect the ill-definedness.
Cool groups I might have joined, with illustrative songs, had I only applied myself in high school band, where the other percussionists monopolized the drums and forced me to play xylophone and glockenspiel (*shakes fist*) because I’d come through a junior high program with compulsory bells and they hadn’t:
This is what happens when I become distracted while trying to study the conceptual design of languages of description for the organization of information and resources.
First it was Allison Carlyle’s pleasantly accessible article on FRBR as a conceptual model that set me jonesin’ for Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s slacker philoso-fest. And pining for (big sigh) a successful model of Love, one that contains all the answers.
Of all of the things that a model can model, abstractions may be the most difficult. One reason is that the act of modeling, particularly the type of modeling that the creators of FRBR used, is often an attempt to make something that is abstract into something that is, at least in some senses, concrete. That is, it is an attempt to make the presence of an abstraction knowable by identifying the things that point to its existence.
To give an example outside of cataloging, imagine trying to model something like love. Love is an abstraction, but it is something we all know and can recognize. Exactly how do we do that? To make a model of love that can be used in research or in some other kind of rationalized practice or process, we operationalize it. Operationalizing makes it possible to observe, to count, or to verify something like love. However, operationalizing something very abstract like love is not only difficult, it can cross the line into the comical. For instance, because we cannot see love, we have to identify things that are observable to indicate the presence or existence of love…[B]ut no matter how many of them we come up with, any model of love gives a rather sorry representation of the real thing.
Now it is the FRBR entity-relationship model itself, plus Patrick Wilson’s assessment of the most appropriate level for exerting bibliographical control, that has tangled with the delicious chewy center of a certain rhapsody in blue.
For all these reasons [i.e. texts are valued for more than the information they contain; statements often can be understood or appraised only in terms of their context], and more that might be adduced, it will not be advantageous to make our account of bibliographical control apply generally to units smaller than whole texts and copies of them…The problem of bibliographical control is not simply one of locating items of information, and not one to be solved by attempting to analyze writings into units of information.
