I’ve been reading a “Norton critical edition” of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. The book includes the 1818 edition of the tale (the more familiar third edition, significantly revised, was published in 1831), eighteen contemporaneous and modern reviews and critical essays, a bibliography referring to an additional forty books and journal articles, and a few miscellaneous letters and poems thrown in for context.
Besides pointing to some deficiencies of my education (who knew that Igor was entirely a creature of the movies? Why was a comparatively short novel, only 155 pages in the edition I’m reading, published in three volumes in 1818?), reading the real McCoy has inspired a couple small musings.
Frankenstein starts with an epigraph from Milton’s Paradise Lost, but that was hardly the only literary influence on Shelley. Both of her parents were well-known authors, her husband was Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she self-consciously engaged in a program of reading to the point where her journal largely consists of a reading list. Among other things, Frankenstein is a response to Milton, various Gothic works by Hazlitt Ann Radcliffe, and various poems by Percy and Byron written around the time of the famous compact to write ghost stories that inspired Shelley to write.
From a purely mechanical point of view, the 336-page volume in hand, besides containing the text and a finite number of critical essays that could be catalogued and related to each other, must directly or indirectly refer to many dozens of books that would have been known to Shelley and hundreds of works of criticism that came later, to say nothing of the movies and plays that reinterpret the Frankenstein story and the thousands of works that simply evoke the image of Frankenstein’s monster or Shelley’s response to the Faust story. If you’ve gotten tired going through that last sentence, consider the plight of the poor cataloger who takes an expansive view of creating metadata describing Frankenstein work and this particular version that bundles in a number of essays. Relative to the possibilities, the 504 in LC’s MARC record is wanting:
“Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-336).”
Nor can you get a list of the titles and authors of the critical essays from the bib record. I’m not criticizing LC or the cataloger, cataloging rules and economic realities being what they are, but there’s an opportunity that I hope the cataloging and metadata community can work towards — not just focusing on the item in hand, but placing each work in the rich web of relationships of reference, homage, response, parody, and criticism. Barring a trek to strange and weird places to assemble a generous library board that can subsidize a week of effort to catalogue each complicated work, some notions:
- A metadata record can never be done — even a completely analyzed MARC bib record does not sufficiently relate a rich work to its influencers and influencees.
- Of course, at any given point in time it does have to be good enough to satisfy the users and those paying the bills.
- Since no one cataloger can even begin to note all connections of one rich work to another, metadata culture must promote the easy enhancement of bibliographic records (or RDF triple-clouds, or whatever) by anybody qualified (and probably, anybody half-way qualified).
- Bibliographic metadata must be linkable to other sources of metadata.
A final musing — the report of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control mentions the idea of speeding cataloging record production by getting basic metadata from the publishers. I have my reservations about whether publishers will be interested in fully cooperating with such a scheme, but suppose they do — would it be too much to ask to have them provide bibliographies in some kind of machine-readable format? I think this, all by itself, would be a big win for humanities researchers.
