ABS: Smiraglia, Derivative bibliographic relationships

[Gretchen Whitney]

Richard P. Smiraglia, Palmer Sch. of LIS, Long Island Univ.
Derivative bibliographic relationships among theological works.

Knowledge: Creation, Organization and Use. Procs. of the 62nd ASIS Annual
Meeting.  Medford, NJ: Information Today, 1999. p.497-506

Derivative relationships are the primary relationships that exist among
the members of a bibliographic family - the set of interrelated works
where the relationships among entities express shared semantic or
linguistic activity.  Derivative bibliographic relationships exist between
any new conception of a work and its original source (the progenitor), or
its successor, or both.  Discipline was a poor predictor of derivative
relationships in prior studies of derivative bibliographic relationships.
For the present study random samples of works were drawn from the catalogs
of the Bobst Library, New York University, and the Burke Library, Union
Theological Seminary, New York. Two sites were chosen to allow a test of
the differences in collection development patterns between a university
research library and a theological library.  Bibliographic families were
compiled for each work.  Results indicate:  1) derivative bibliographic
relationships exist for somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of
theological works in this study; 2) there is little difference in
proportions of derivative bibliographic relationships or in the size of
bibliographic families between the two collections; 3) there is a positive
correlation between the age of the progenitor work and the size of the
bibliographic family; 4) there are significant gaps in coverage of
theological bibliographic families online; 5) there is some evidence of
differing patterns of derivation between Judaic and Islamic literature and
Christian literature; 5) forms and genres are useful in a limited way for
predicting the incidence of derivative relationships in theological
literature.

------------------------

c. ASIS, reprinted with permission
Please visit their website at www.asis.org





<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Gretchen Whitney, PhD                                     tel 423.974.7919
School of Information Sciences                            fax 423.974.4967
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA           gwhitney at utk.edu
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>