Karen G. Schneider: OPACs should be FRBRy
From How OPACs Suck, Part II: The Checklist of Shame, a blog post from Monday by Karen G. Schneider. The whole thing is worth reading, but I’ll just highlight one point:
Features Your OPAC Wishes It Had
Duplicate detection—This is an interesting search-engine feature to discuss for online catalogs. It raises the issue of FRBR (pronounced FER-ber)—Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records—which is, to be grossly reductive, duplicate management for online catalogs, so that a user isn’t stumped by five records for what is essentially the same item. But in a search engine, duplicate detection simply flags multiple records for the same item and ideally gives you control over how to handle search results when duplicates are detected.