James Weinheimer wrote:
>
> ... FRBR states that for a
> record to function, it must allow people to "find, identify, select, and
> obtain" "works, expressions, manifestations and items." It was never tested
> among the non-library community (that I know of) and what it says is
> certainly highly dubious in today's world, which has new tools that were
> completely unknown in the 1990s, e.g. pre-Google, pre-Web2.0. In my own
> opinion, what FRBR actually does is to describe the library-centric view of
> the information universe as it stood in the 1990s.
Actually, this was still not very far ahead of the universe as it stood
in 1900.
Back then, hunting for information, one had to think of printed matter,
of bound volumes, of works, editions, items. Librarians still feel very
much at home in that mental model, but it is highly artificial, and it
always was. Only as late as the 1990s, new models emerged that get much
closer to the ways non-librarians feel comfortable with.
"Hunting for information" - this can mean more than one thing: facts and
figures, food for constructive thought, fuel for the imagination.
Almost always, the task does not directly translate into something like,
hey, we need to find book X by that bloke Y, so let's go looking what
items of which manifestations we may find of that work, or if there are
even different expressions to choose from! This kind of task arises only
as a secondary one: being pointed to a book by references, mentionings,
recommendations. The primary questions can now be put to devices like
search engines that may lead directly to relevant and sufficient
resources in all sorts of formats - or, just sometimes, the process may
yield some reference to printed text. And only then, FRBR may flex its
muscles and be of service.
In short:
1. FRBR data are of very limited use for the real tasks of users, in
whatever format we may present them: they cannot answer most of
the real questios.
2. In ever fewer cases, printed text can be of help for those tasks,
in ever more cases, more useful resources can be found by other
means.
Now we may be sure that libraries will, for a long while, contain a
wealth of recorded knowledge not available online, so they will continue
to be needed. They have to improve the ways of linking into their
catalogs from outside sources, and to improve and speed up delivery.
If we want better catalogs - but maybe we don't need then, considering
that references to books are increasingly sought and found elsewhere -
then the inclusion of ToC and other textual data would increase their
retrieval power a lot more than RDA and FRBRization.
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Oct 20 2009 - 09:20:28 EDT