> 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)?
> >
To which Karen replied:
>
> 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.
I suppose I'm thinking, is it possible for these relationships to work
in an implicit rather than explicit way? So, if I were to catalogue two
items and explicitly state that they share the same author, same title,
publisher, same publication date etc. do I also need to explicitly say
that they are part of the same manifestation, or can this be deduced
from the information available? Perhaps another way of looking at it, is
given an item in the hand and an item in the catalogue, we expect a
cataloguer to be able to make the decision that they belong to the same
manifestation - would it be possible for a system to do the same?
>
> 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.
>
Can you recommend where I should start reading on this? (I'm just being
lazy, but it is home time on Friday)
> 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.
OK - what is the best thing I can do here? I'm very happy to contribute
over the general throwing in my 2c worth, but don't want to do my own
thing, and find the idea of doing a model from scratch slightly
intimidating - but I'm ready to take part in something beyond just
discussing it...
Owen
Received on Fri Dec 07 2007 - 12:07:02 EST