Alex Reczkowski wrote:
> James Weinheimer wrote:
> Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 7:53 AM
> <snip>
> I still believe that FRBR is primarily a look backward instead of a look forward. I see it much more of an explanation of how traditional library bibliographic records are structured instead of looking beyond.
> <snip>
>
> I tried to reconcile this with Karen Coyle's blog post from last week [http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/11/future-of-bibliographic-controllc-1113.html]:
> <snip>
> 4.2 Realize FRBR. The framework known as FRBR has great potential but so far is untested. ...
> <snip>
>
I agree with Jim W, at least in part, that FRBR is a look at the catalog
and the catalog record as we define them today. You can see that in the
user tasks, which are steps that users take when looking for something
*in the library catalog* - which is different from looking for
information. In that sense, FRBR is not a forward-looking model, IMO. At
the same time, it does add the potential of including more relationships
between works, and of treating creators and other actors as entities in
themselves. This I think is a positive development. If I could pick and
choose parts of FRBR to work with, I'd probably drop the user tasks, or
rework them to include a much broader view of user activity (like
sharing, citing, storing, linking, etc.); I'd treat the Group 1 entities
as relationships but not a strict hierarchy (which is how they seem to
be interpreted by most); and I'd place an emphasis on the relationships
in section 5, and would expand those to include other relationships such
as "cited by". I also must say that the attributes listed in FRBR appear
to be almost random. If they are relevant, then they need more
explication. Right now they read like the Chinese encyclopedia of Borges
(http://www.multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html). If nothing else,
we should create a core of attributes that is expandable, rather than
attempt a complete list that includes items at markedly different levels
of detail.
Perhaps when we talk about FRBR being untested, we mean that we haven't
tested a functional, relational model of bibliographic data. We use
"FRBR" as a shorthand for this model, even though further work may
produce something different from the published FRBR model.
kc
--
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Fri Nov 30 2007 - 11:30:58 EST