Martha Yee
Martha Yee runs cataloguing at the UCLA Film and Television Archives. If you’ve been reading The FRBR Blog for a while then you’ll remember that in February she answered the Four FRBR Questions. Well, now she has a new web site, and on it she’s posted Cataloging Rules (29 November 2007 draft). I quote:
These rules refer to and adapt definitions of the entities work, expression, manifestation, and item as found in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records or FRBR, for short. FRBR is valuable because of its attempt to define concepts that have been implicit in Anglo-American cataloging practice for several hundred years at least. Unfortunately, the tables in the back of FRBR that attempt to map the elements of the bibliographic description to these four entities (work, expression, manifestation and item) are deeply flawed. This code suggests implicitly a better mapping of these data elements to the FRBR entities.
She announced this by sending mail to a few mailing lists, and David Bigwood at Catalogablog posted her e-mail message. I quote part of a paragraph:
I have been a vocal critic during this process [the creation of RDA], but it occurred to me that people might not really understand what I was talking about without a demonstration code, an alternative RDA, so to speak. Thus, with the help of many generous and intelligent friends, whom I acknowledge in the introduction, I have created such a code, which you can view at http://myee.bol.ucla.edu. Since it is clear that we need to move toward more standard ways of coding our data within the sphere of the internet, I have made a stab at creating an RDF model of my cataloging code, as well.
She’s also started the Yee Cataloging Rules Weblog for discussion of her rules. On AUTOCAT, J. McRee Elrod said, “I move we abandon RDA and adopt these.” Karen Coyle started a work area on her FutureLib wiki for discussion of Yee’s schema.
I recommend keeping an eye out for whatever Martha Yee writes, on FRBR or anything else. I’ve saved several messages she’s sent to mailing lists because she writes so powerfully about librarianship.