Stephens, Owen wrote:
>
> Is our primary aim to (a) present information in a FRBR type way, or to
> (b) catalogue things in a FRBR type way?
> If (a), is (b) a pre-requisite?
> If not, are there other approaches that still result in (a) without
> doing (b)?
>
I think it depends on what you mean by (b). To provide users with a view
of the relationships that are in FRBR, those relationships must be in
the data in a way that a computer program can make use of them. This
means that a note that says: "Abridged version of ..." doesn't get you a
FRBR-related display.
What I think scares many people is the idea of doing all of this "extra"
coding of relationships in the records. That's where we need to 1)
figure out what relationships are actually needed and 2) determine the
most efficient way to get them into and out of records. That #1 is part
of the work that Diane Hillmann keeps plugging, the RDA in RDF project.
It is this need to establish and code relationships that convinces me
that we will need something either other than or in addition to the MARC
record. MARC is capsule, a closed environment. It is not good at linking
to other resources. As a matter of fact, it tends to try to pull into
itself related items (in the 77x and 78x fields). I think of it as a
kind of macrophage. Regardless of what we use as a communications
format, our internal formats will need to be more distributed, more
relational. In my experience, the data in MARC is far from ideal for that.
Until we do some real work on this it isn't possible to say what we DO
need and how different it will be from what we have today. That's why
the work is so essential. Right now, we're all discussing this without
having any data behind us. I'd rather be modeling.
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 Dec 07 2007 - 10:08:33 EST