Michael Sloan reviews D-Lib paper
Everyone in my old library school’s Information Technology Applications course has to set up a blog, it appears: here’s a list of them all.
One of them is Michael Sloan, who recently posted Hierarchical Catalog Records (Article Review). (Doing a review counts for 20% of his grade. FIS and SLIS at the University of Alabama are preparing cohorts of library bloggers for the world.) Anyhow, it’s an interesting and wide-ranging review. This D-Lib article is getting more attention than I’d expected. More of you should write more about FRBR!
With respects to my own experiences cataloguing at the University of Toronto, I can appreciate the motivation behind the FRBR way of rethinking the problem of analytical cataloguing. Cataloguing MARC records with AACR2 and MARC 21 rules is both a difficult task (one at odds with the tendency in universities to hire non-professionals for record clean-up) and at times frustratingly vague; for example, in the ALA reference book ‘Cataloguing with AACR2 & MARC 21’ (2004) it states: “The need to use uniform titles varies from one catalogue to another and varies within one catalogue” (3.1-51). Use of field 247 for Former Title, or Title Variations and field 130 or 240 for Uniform Titles suffer from this same kind of vagueness brought about by semantic ambiguity. The UTCAT includes additional bibliographic notes (i.e. 500 lines) which would be lost in the conversion process to FRBR, though from my own experience many of these notes seem to be more meaningful to cataloguers then the end users of the catalogue.