Changing Nature of the Catalog
The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools (175 KB PDF), by Karen Calhoun of Cornell University Library, draft 2b, prepared for the Library of Congress.
You’ll want to read the whole thing, but here are the FRBR-related quotes cited in the report, taken from interviews with twenty-three leading people in the field. See page 34 of the report.
What needs to be part of catalog data to support FRBR catalogs, new kinds of delivery services, data mining, mass digitization, offsite storage, etc.? Libraries should be using their catalog data more aggressively, processing it more, and passing it around more.
We need FRBR to rethink where we are; I am not sure FRBR is the right solution but it is an attempt to address the right problem.
We should FRBRize our data. FRBR has a lot of potential; its structure is more like users think.
The catalog is being rethought in light of FRBR—people want to see clusters rather than long lists.
A FRBR view of collections by work is good; I’m a little nervous because it pushes catalogers into more content analysis.
A FRBRized display would allow us to more easily expand to add new types of resources. For example, flat MARC has never worked well for AV.
We can’t implement FRBR- like enhancements in the current metasearch environment.
I saw this mentioned on Catalogablog, and David Bigwood also links to a a critical analysis of the report (which doesn’t mention FRBR).