Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 15:21:14 +0000

You've run into a problem with FRBR-ization - the grouping of various manifestations into a single work record.  Amazon is rational to present their items this way because "most" people don't care which edition of (to avoid the Ulysses quagmire) Tom Sawyer they get (or "The Hunt for Red October" or ...). This is frustrating to scholars and bibliophiles, but not enough to damage Amazon's bottom line. (How this affects publishing incentives is a fair question.)

What is troubling, or at least worth considering, is that OCLC does the same thing - albeit with more finesse, granularity, and transparency - in Worldcat.org.  That granularity and finesse is possible because of the much richer, more uniform metadata that libraries have in the past provided about their materials.  Again, perhaps not too troubling for "most" users of Worldcat.org.  Consider, on the other hand, their push to have Worldcat replace local library systems - with the very real cost and labor savings that represents.

The search "ulysses joyce modern library" in Worldcat today provides results you might approve of.  Interrogating the actual holdings attached to that description is less promising.  Arguably an improvement over the Amazon results.

But here is the moral: cutting catalogers, switching to only "discovery" style searches, and chasing efficiency all come at a cost.  Accurate, granular metadata suitable for scholarly research is not cheap.  Those of us who value it need to explain its value to those who control budgets.  Or at least make the tradeoffs explicit to those who must balance the books.

Scott

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Scott Matheson, Associate Librarian for Technical Services
Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School
203-432-1603 | Box 208326, New Haven, CT 06520-8326