ngc4lib: Jenn Riley comment
I point out something in the ngc4lib mailing list (“next generation catalogs for libraries”) archives every now and then. You might want to join the list. Thursday Jenn Riley, a music librarian, sent a comment in response to Jim Weinheimer:
I think it’s important to remember that FRBR is a *conceptual* model. The entities in FRBR don’t necessarily have to be “records” in a catalog the same way we have records today, individual screens or tabs a cataloger has to interact with. It’s certainly simple from a system point of view to make records that match FRBR entities, but even if we do this, it doesn’t mean that a cataloger has to manually create or even *see* each of these records. It could all be handled from a simple screen indicating formats, or even just generating format information from files on a file system. We need good (or even reasonable?) UI design for cataloging interfaces, even more now than ever before. The cataloging interface does *not* have to mirror the underlying database structure. Ditto the end-user interface.
If you follow the link in the Subject line you can see the whole thread, which is about a digitized version of Cutter’s Rules (which I couldn’t see in Google Books but could see here).
Vive Cutter! Vive Ranganathan! Vive Lubetzky!