Union Records and Dossiers: Extended Bibliographic Information Objects.

AbstractThe growing number and sophistication of online bibliographic and network based infor-mation systems is starting to blur the once clear boundaries that separated print documents.Two concepts emerge as a consequence of these developments, first the unionrecord, an entitywhich combines multiple catalog records for a single bibliographic item into an extended infor-mation object; and second, an information dossier, a hypertext-like information object builtby linking several distinct but related bibliographic entities. 1 Introduction The process of automation is a slow one that often leads to unforeseen consequences, some pos-itive and some negative. Technology ordinarily first computerizes “current practice”, sometimesawkwardly, and only later, after much thought and experiment, are the “advances” made. Onlinecatalogs are a good example of this tendency. First generation online catalogs merely put the linearcatalog cards in a box and made them nearly impossible to browse. Second generation catalogsadded boolean access, and emerging third generation systems are now breaking out of the linearpresentation model [Buckland 93b]. We are now beginning to see that online catalogs can be muchmore than automated card catalogs [Norgard 93].The storage of text online has followed a similar path, slowly leading from 80-column punchedcards to hypertext. Even hypertext, once confined to links between a group of files on a singlecomputer, is now starting to proliferate across the network in the form of HTTP clients and servers[Nickerson 92]. Just as the linear nature of the card catalog is giving way to new forms of presenta-tion, the linear model of online text is being replaced by a new linked model [Ardo 92, Bertha 92].However, this linking has brought with it something else. It is no longer a simple matter to identifythe extentof a document. Where does one document end the next begin? What is the appropriate1