The FRBR Blog

Disintegration, disenchantment, distrust, and development by Candy Zemon, of the library system vendor Polaris, mentions FRBR briefly.

There is a bandwagon rolling about in email-list-land, the biblioblogosphere, conference presentations, and other library industry publications. It seems that the PAC (public catalog) sucks. And that putting lipstick on the pig (to quote Andrew Pace) doesn’t make it any more attractive.

I doubt you will find many folks who would argue much with the points made about particular public catalogs: that they are dull, jargon-laden, poorly designed, obscure, inconsistent in navigation, slow, labyrinthine, fragmented, usable only with a librarian’s point of view and expertise, complex, and downright unhelpful and obstructive.

… Open source software and people willing to use it are changing some of the ground rules. The importance of accessing information both inside and outside the library world means opening ourselves to more than one true data transmission protocol (our favored MARC). FRBR notions of data modeling force us to look at relationships and tasks as being critical to providing efficient information service. New technologies and new expectations of service across the entire range of our customer base stretch everyone’s notion of what a library could or should do.