More potent than FRBR
Dan Chudnov made a blog post on 1 January called On Borders, and said:
The answer was stated, if I’m not mistaken (sorry, I don’t have an exact reference, does anyone know?), at the turn of the 19th century, which makes it an unfulfilled, three-century-spanning statement of user requirements more potent than FRBR: that libraries must provide users with the ability to search and browse the whole bibliographic universe, and keep a locally-optimized subset of that universe close at hand….
That premise, the access to the whole bibliographic universe piece, is utterly unfulfilled in every library I know well today. In its place we manage barriers in information-space which evoke the same kinds of metaphors.
FRBR’s user tasks certainly handle the first half of that answer: find, identify, select, and obtain. The second half is beyond FRBR’s scope (it’s functional requirements for bibliographic records, after all). I don’t know what source he’s thinking of, but in the nineteenth century or now, that subset, no matter what you did with it, would have to be a small one. The bibliographic universe is large, but every library has a piece of it, specially arranged and optimized for its users, and what they don’t have, they can help you find.
Er, maybe I didn’t make my point clearly. As a statement of *user* requirements, it is more compelling than FRBR.
Sure, that’s a silly thing to say, as FRBR is indeed about bibliographic requirements. I think, though, that some people lose sight of this distinction, especially system designers focused on interpreting the FRBR model as a system requirements or user requirements statement. This seems like a mistake to me, as we should be able to match (given the state and cost of technology in early 2006) the user requirement of searching and browsing the entire bibliographic universe… or certainly at least a much larger chunk of it than any particular smaller, locally-optimized subset. There just needs to be a reliably high local-cache hit rate on things local users tend to look for, and optimized services (human or otherwise) for retrieving things not immediately available remotely (which we already do, of course, but typically not quite so simply, from users’ perspectives).
Does that make sense? -dchud
Comment by dchud — 10 January 2006 @ 12:00 pm