Yes, FRAD I have significant concerns about FRAD fundamentally, I
agree. It is not right.
I just still don't understand your concerns on FRBR itself. It seems
pretty good to me. It seems a lot better than nothing. It was based on
formalizing 100 years of cataloging practice, and I think this is the
right way to go. Sure, it needs some tweaks, perhaps a whole lot of
tweaks, but it's fundamental basis seems sound to me.
What is the actual alternative to going ahead with FRBR? Another 10
years of dickering around and not going forward obviously isn't a
solution. You and I (if not some) agree that tinkering with AACR2 as
rules for creating narrative text without an underlying formalized model
isn't a solution (although not everyone in this discussion does). So...
what?
Jonathan
Karen Coyle wrote:
> Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>
>> All of this makes sense. BUT once someone HAS established a work for
>> The Conquest of Bread and filled in it's subjects, I shouldn't _have_
>> to go assigning subjects every time I make a new manifestation record,
>> should I? I should be able to inherit from that work, such that when
>> the work subjects are changed (someoen does a better job), my
>> manifestation knows that too.
>>
>
> Right. In the same way that when I use a name heading, if an authority
> record already exists I don't need to add cross references. So there is
> some inheritance here, although as Aaron Dobbs points out, if you let
> people delete subject headings from Works, then you may have deleted
> them for everyone else. This is one of the reasons why a strict
> hierarchy doesn't work for me, because of the ripple effects. So now we
> come to all of the issues of ownership and versioning, and how those get
> controlled in the process. This would be an interesting scenario to work
> through: how do we share in a way that we get the efficiencies but
> minimize the ripple of disruption that some changes could cause? This
> fits into the idea that was floating around of trying to design a system
> of "distributed cataloging."
>
>
>> But you've got to do all that on top of a formalized domain model.
>> Having a formalized domain model is what even gives us the language to
>> have this discussion. And the work you do on top of the formalized
>> domain model will no doubt give you insights suggesting changes in the
>> underlying formalized domain model, in an iterative process. That's
>> fine. But you've got to start sometime, and you've got to have a
>> formalized domain model.
>>
>
> I don't think that anyone is arguing that we don't need a formalized
> model. I consider it a given that we do. Unfortunately, a bad model
> isn't going to do us any good, and there are parts of FRBR that I have
> serious doubts about. (Remember that the Future of Bibliographic Control
> report said that LC should not accept RDA until we have done some
> testing of FRBR -- if the underlying model is flawed, what we build on
> it cannot work.) We DO need to hack away on FRBR to see if it works, but
> unfortunately we cannot change it -- FRBR is fully under the control of
> IFLA and IFLA does not seem to be interacting beyond the boundaries of
> its committee structure in the development of the models.
>
> I am also very concerned about some of the conclusions in FRAD, because
> they seem to indicate that the committee does not understand the E-R
> concept. An example of this is that FRAD has declared the name of a
> person, corporate body or family (in the form of a controlled access
> point) to be an entity in itself, and ditto the identifier for person,
> etc. I'd love for the IFLA work to be more open -- I want to know why
> they think like they do, and what their definition of an entity is, and
> all kinds of other things. I'd love to be having this conversation in a
> forum that would inform the FR models that IFLA is developing. Instead,
> I feel like we're in a "take it or leave it" situation. And, as you can
> imagine, I'm not happy about that.
>
> kc
>
>
Received on Wed Oct 21 2009 - 18:44:52 EDT