>> So when a person or a concept gets its own page in some service like IMDb.com or LibraryThing, and is the focus for other activities, I have to say, hey,that's what the original 1997 FRBR paper was talking about.
Or to use more precise words, I inferred from the 1997 FRBR report where things were going. The Find and Identify user tasks as they relate to Persons or Concepts are in FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) at http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/FRANAR-ConceptualModel-2ndReview.pdf <http://anthony.library.guelph.on.ca/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/FRANAR-ConceptualModel-2ndReview.pdf>
Sorting through the way tasks, entities, attributes, and relationships are mapped in FRBR/FRAD, I tried to categorize some the recent discussion topics according to user tasks in ways that might be useful:
>Find<
Person, Family, Corporate Body, Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item, Concept, Object, Event, Place, Name, Identifier, Controlled Access Point
Some discussion of what type of identifier would best be used to find these entities might fall into this category-ex., match points on readable headings, URIs, etc.
>Identify<
Person, Family, Corporate Body, Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item, Concept, Object, Event, Place, Name, Identifier, Controlled Access Point, Rules, Agency
Some discussion of disambiguating identical names might fall into this category. Check out the list of attributes to use to help disambiguate names in FRAD. I mentioned that IMDb.com has a keyword result screen that sorts the results roughly by type of entity with a lot of data to help disambiguate similar names.
>Select<
Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item
Some discussion of using human-readable descriptive data vs machine-readable fixed field data might fall into this category. Limits and facet filter options are used to select these entities based upon content or carrier attributes. I would characterize some of the new facet-based interfaces like Endeca as putting the Select user task on steroids-a lot of the data in MARC records are brought to the surface and exploited quite well in these interfaces. Note that at this stage we are getting closer to picking a resource that matches our exact needs based upon criteria such as media or format.
>Obtain<
Manifestation, Item
One can only "obtain" the most concrete entities.
>Contextualize<
Person, Family, Corporate Body, Work, Expression, Place, Name, Controlled Access Point
>Justify<
Person, Corporate Body, Work, Controlled Access Point, Rules
************************
Going back to the original post about services against collections, which refers to new services that are based upon full-text indexing, I think we still have to pass through the gates of these basic user tasks as defined in FRBR/FRAD for many of the service-based activities we perform in libraries.
Service to the user is always of paramount importance, but it's also a matter of the degree to what we rely on the catalogue to do for us. I do reference work as well and I use that opportunity to think about customer service in relation to the catalogue. There were three cases today that were instructive:
1. A patron had used the catalogue to successfully locate a government publication. It was in storage and I had to retrieve it. I told the patron she could have selected an online copy of the publication, but she said that she specifically selected the print copy because of ease-of-use. Hmmm, I thought, this seems to confirm my view that public library users are not as driven to the online world as academic library users. Certainly the use of electronic resources is rising, but so is the use of traditional material.
2. A social networking tool that has been around for a while is the Just Returned truck. A patron had found vol. 8 of a Nero Wolfe DVD set on the Just Returned truck and wanted to know if we had vol. 1 (this person was probably too intimidated to use the catalogue). I found the item on the shelf for the patron after searching the catalogue [I also glanced with curiousity as to if this was an analyzed title (it was) or part of single record set]. Capturing usage statistics and social networking data is a great new direction for libraries, but we have to be sure that people don't fall through the cracks when thinking about these services.
3. A patron required books to help him learn Italian. After further questioning and after helping him examine the books our library held, we determined that a simpler book with somewhat larger print and with pronunciation guides (he didn't have a CD or cassette player for our language audio items) would be best. How many of those criteria that were used for selection would have made it into our catalogue? Not many it seems-- I really only used the subject heading then the call number range to find these books. So there's always going to be a sliding scale in terms of providing the level of detail to help the user accomplish his tasks. Cataloguing and other information services will always be part of some balancing act. My view has been that we should always be doing what we have been doing, but better and more economically (I'm thinking of series control specifically) because the nature of shared cataloguing and distributed work should allow us to do that. The same tools (co!
mputers, the web, etc.) should also allow us to add new functionality.
Thomas Brenndorfer, B.A, M.L.I.S.
Guelph Public Library
100 Norfolk St.
Guelph, ON
N1H 4J6
(519) 824-6220 ext. 276
tbrenndorfer_at_library.guelph.on.ca
Received on Sat May 19 2007 - 12:01:25 EDT