Karen Coyle wrote:
> Actually, the 'dumb idea' is in the cataloging rules. And it's not an
> easy one to solve when you have a 'unit record' concept like we do in
> MARC. It's one of the problems that FRBR should solve for us if we
> create a structure that allows manifestations to link to expressions
> which link to works. But when you have it all together in one MARC
> record, you have to choose one physical format as the one represented by
> the record. We went through this ad nauseum in all of the discussion of
> 'multiple versions' and never found a solution that was compatible with
> MARC *and* facilitated record sharing.
I don't think FRBR is necessary. XML processing can eliminate duplicates in all kinds of ways, so I still believe that the main thing is to dump the ISO2709 format ASAP, change to some kind of XML format, be it MARCXML or MODS, switch to URIs the moment LC (finally) puts everything online, then share our records widely (!!) in all different kinds of formats.
Even though the library world is so far behind in so many ways at the moment, this would possibly put us very near the forefront because we have such a rich amount of metadata that nobody can match. This could raise the status of libraries at a very delicate and critical time in our history.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Wed Apr 22 2009 - 13:47:24 EDT