On 10/08/2011 16:25, Brenndorfer, Thomas wrote:
<snip>
> As Crocodile Dundee, armed with his gear in the film of the same name,
> once said when being mugged in New York City: "A knife? That's not a
> knife. Now, this is a knife!" No, those examples from WorldCat barely
> scratch the surface. Huckleberry Finn in LibraryThing comes a little
> closer to what FRBR can lead to:
> http://www.librarything.com/work/3093889/summary The work-to-work
> relationships which are absent in WorldCat are present here: Work -
> Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "is contained in" "has the adaptation"
> "is abridged in" "inspired" "has as a study" "has as a commentary on
> the text" "has as a student's study guide"
</snip>
So, you are suggesting that we should aim for full-scale FRBR
relationships? Without any research that this is what our patrons need?
Of course, these relationships cannot happen in reality since in order
not to avoid the unfortunate effect that the millions of records we now
have would be left out and more difficult to find, there would have to
be major work done to those records, probably on a one-by-one basis, to
decide that this one "is contained in" or "abridged in" or whatever.
Unless there would be flotillas of catalogers hired to update these
older records, the results of adding those relationships will forever be
unpredictable. Plus, a business case must be demonstrated not only that
the public actually needs to be able to do this, it also needs to be
demonstrated that they need those tasks at the expense of other
possibilities: e.g. cataloging more items. All this at a time of
decreasing staff. Of course, it could be crowdsourced, but that is
difficult to rely upon. Of course, a compelling business case has always
been lacking with FRBR/RDA, as the latest report highlighted.
If there were convincing evidence that the public genuinely needs these
relationships and that the results we see in Worldcat are truly not
adequate (and Worldcat can't be improved enough such as adding word
clouds to the results), I would be the first to agree because then, we
would *know* that we are genuinely providing a service where the public
has spoken very loudly that it wants and needs. However, I seriously
doubt that if given a choice the public would want us to add
relationships such as "abridged in" "has a study" "inspired" etc. as no.
1, even at a major cost to productivity--but I could be wrong! (By the
way, some of those work-to-work relationships in the LibraryThing
example seem a little strange. A lot of them look like variant
expressions to me)
<snip>
> I would also suggest reading up on what a "strawman" fallacy is:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman
</snip>
Well, I thought they both remained very polite and respectful toward one
another. For example, the patron did not fly off the handle when looking
at all of this meaningless, incomprehensible gobbledygook and asked some
very pointed questions politely. The librarian was not patronizing and
did not wind up proclaiming that the catalog actually *does* give the
information the patron needed--that is, if she only worked harder and
knew more about what she *really* wanted; then suggest that she sign up
for a multi-hour tutorial that he or one of his colleagues was teaching
on how to search the catalog *correctly*. I have witnessed both of these
types of encounters and the reactions on each side have not been positive.
The "library catalog" gave the only answers it could.
--
James Weinheimer weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
Received on Wed Aug 10 2011 - 11:25:54 EDT