The FRBR Blog

If you read this blog, and you do, because you are, you know about Martha Yee. She’s Cataloging Supervisor at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Film and Television Archive. It’s the kind of place where, for example, as happens Friday, Shirley MacLaine, Audrey Wilder, and Curtis Hanson come by for a discussion and a showing of The Apartment, the great Billy Wilder movie with MacLaine, Jack Lemmon, and Fred MacMurray. As a film, it’s one of the best ever, classic-wise.

She’s often mentioned on this blog. Here are a few relevant posts:

• January, she spoke at the FRBR implementers meeting at the ALA conference.
• September 2006, she spoke at the Beyond the OPAC conference in Australia.
• October 2006, she was announced as contributing a chapter to Arlene Taylor’s upcoming book on FRBR (due out this spring).
• July 2005, her paper FRBRization: A Method for Turning Online Public Finding Lists into Online Public Catalogs came out.

Yesterday she sent out this announcement:

We (UCLA Film & Television Archive) released our new OPAC interface today, at: http://cinema.library.ucla.edu

Try out the pre-existing works search for an example of a search of superworks using existing records (main entry and uniform titles) and existing catalog technology (Voyager); a search on shakespeare, or a search on hamlet, or a search on maugham will give you a good demonstration. Note the value of providing a keyword in heading search with a display of matched headings, so that users need not know the entry terms in our headings in order to find the entities they seek.

Unfortunately, Voyager will not allow us to build an A-Z title index using both title added entries in bibliographic records and title cross references in authority records. For that reason work searchers in our catalog must always do two searches (title and title variants) to be sure we do not have the moving image work they are seeking under title. TAOS did allow us to build such an index, so for this particular feature, Voyager represents a step backwards for us.

Unfortunately, Voyager will also not allow a true main entry sort of bibliographic records retrieved (130 if present, if not, 245), and the sort for the left to right title index (our default search) dedupes to the first title of any kind in the alphabet on any given bibliographic record, so displays of multiple records can easily fail to display all the expressions of a work together.

We still have a long way to go on the road made by walking!

We create work-based authority records (you can see an example if you do a title variants search on Raise the red lantern, and then click on the “notes” button–Voyager won’t let us display the whole authority record, but at least we can display the public notes). Our bibliographic records are expression-based, and we attach multiple MARC 21 holdings records for multiple manifestations (differences in format and distribution information without differences in underlying content). Even though this is “cheating” in the current shared cataloging environment, it was absolutely imperative to do it in a preserving film archive. One of our preserved films, Becky Sharp, is a good example of why this is imperative!

Pop open a fresh tab or window and try out the searches she suggests.