Richard P. Smiraglia

Many attempts followed to define work and the relationships between it and the various instances and forms in which it appears. One of the best known is the FRBR entity-relationship model, which Smiraglia credits with providing “the separate identification, for the first time in the history of bibliographic control, of ‘the work’ as an essential and distinct bibliographic entity.” In the FRBR model, a work is a distinct intellectual or artistic creation (for instance, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet); an expression is an intellectual or artistic realization of a work (the original language text of the play); a manifestation physically embodies a work’s expression (a 2007 edition of the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet from Cambridge University Press); and an item is a single exemplar of a manifestation (a single copy of the edition of Romeo and Juliet just mentioned).

In The Nature of “A Work”: Implications for the Organization of Knowledge, published in 2001, Smiraglia provides a history of the treatment and role of works (as in literary works, musical works, etc. – intellectual or artistic creations) in catalogs and a survey of empirical research into the work phenomenon. Traditional modern library catalogs, Smiraglia observes, were designed to “inventory (first) and retrieve (second) specific documents,” and were built “on an assumption that there was a correspondence between a book and the work it contained – one item, one work, and vice versa." Works don't equal documents (in book form or otherwise), however; Smiraglia delineates between these two concepts and that of “text”:

Smiraglia, a one-time flautist who holds a B.A. in music from Lewis & Clark College (1973), is also known for his work concerning music description and music information storage and retrieval He earned a Masters of Divinity from The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church (1997) as well and is an Episcopalian priest. Currently Professor and member of the Information Organization Research Group at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Smiraglia has taught at Long Island University (1993-2009), Columbia University (1987-1993), and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1974-1986).