Four Questions: Barbara Tillett
It’s a great pleasure today to give you the Four FRBR Questions answered by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, Chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She’s been involved with FRBR for almost fifteen years now! For more about that and the rest of her career, read “An Interview with Barbara B. Tillett,” by Martin Kurth (Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 32 (3), 2001). I mention her a lot on this weblog because she’s very involved with FRBR and has spoken about it all over the world. She’s a member of (most pertinently here) the FRBR Review Group and the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR.
When did you first hear about FRBR?
In 1992 when I was asked to be a consultant to the Study Group on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records with Elaine Svenonius and Ben Tucker. Later Ben retired and Tom Delsey was brought on.
What’s your involvement with it now?
I continue on the FRBR Review Group and continue to speak about the conceptual model and its application to various things like serials, cataloging rules, authority control, other standards, etc.
What’s one thing you think the FRBR world needs most?
Very loaded question as it assumes an FRBR world, which, if we had it, would be great and probably not need anything! But on the other hand if you mean what does the world need need with respect to FRBR organizing the descriptions of our resources and meeting user needs, it needs a great system to take full advantage of the FRBR model’s potential, making the data entry and maintenance simple and the user navigation and understanding intuitive.
What’s your one-line non-librarian description of FRBR?
FRBR is a model of the relationships among things libraries organize and is a listing of the essential information we use to find, identify, select, and obtain those things.