Folium X · Reference

Reference

Work, edition, copy

A book can mean the work you read, the edition in which you read it, or the particular copy you hold. Folium X is designed to keep those distinctions in view.

The three levels

Say you own Pride and Prejudice. That sentence is already ambiguous, because it could mean any of three things.

Every physical book you own sits at all three levels simultaneously. A catalogue that records only the title has collapsed all three into one, and cannot answer questions about the other two.

Why this breaks a home library

These distinctions matter in ordinary situations:

• Accidental duplicates. You buy a book you already own, because your list says “I have this title” and cannot tell you that the copy you have is a battered reading paperback rather than the gift edition you meant to buy.
• Inherited books lose their history. A copy inherited from a parent is not interchangeable with a copy bought last year. The inscription, the provenance and the marginalia belong to that object. Merge them by title and the history is gone.
• Lending becomes untraceable. “Who has my copy?” is a question about a copy. If three copies of a title exist in the house, a title-level record cannot say which one left.
• Location stops working. A title does not sit anywhere. A copy sits somewhere specific, and can be moved without the title changing at all.
• Condition belongs to the copy. Condition is a property of an object. A first printing in a dust jacket and a water-damaged book club edition of the same work are different objects, in different condition.

When a record loses track of the copy, its history becomes harder to follow. Recovering it may mean returning to the book, its inscriptions or the people who remember it.

Where this model comes from

This is not a new idea, and it is not ours. Librarians formalised it decades ago. The 2017 IFLA Library Reference Model, published by the International Federation of Library Associations, unified three earlier models: FRBR, FRAD and FRSAD.

Its central distinctions include Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item, known together as WEMI:

• Work — the intellectual creation.
• Expression — a specific realisation of it, such as a particular translation or a revised text.
• Manifestation — the shared content and physical form of copies produced to the same plan.
• Item — an individual exemplar; here, the particular book on your shelf.

An honest simplification

Folium X draws on these distinctions with three levels rather than four. Its work follows LRM’s Work; its edition is closest to LRM’s Manifestation; its copy is closest to LRM’s Item. Expression is not a separate level.

In the current model, translation and revision details belong to edition records; Expression is not a separate record. That keeps the structure simpler, but it makes some relationships harder to represent—for example, several editions containing the same translation. These distinctions can matter on a home shelf as much as in a research library. They remain a limit of the present model.

How Folium X uses it

Folium X is designed to keep work, edition and copy as separate records that stay linked. Two copies of the same edition remain two records, each with its own location, condition, acquisition history, inscriptions, loans and reading history. Identity operations are designed not to silently merge records that might be different things: where the evidence is ambiguous, the ambiguity is shown for a person to resolve rather than guessed at.

This is why Folium X is designed to answer “which of my three copies is the one Dad gave me, and where is it” — a question that a title-level catalogue cannot represent at all.