Gorman: “FRBR may have some merit”
Michael Gorman (see also his Wikipedia entry) is one of the towering figures in modern cataloguing. I recommend his book Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century, and don’t miss a chance to hear him talk about the subject, either. Of course, if you’ve done any cataloguing then you know his work on Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules.
Every now and then Gorman gets his ginger up and says something lively. His new comments on Resource Description and Access (85 KB PDF) are available online.
Lastly, there is the attachment on the part of the theoreticians to the document Functional requirements for bibliographic records (acronymized to FRBR). FRBR may have some merit as a way of looking at the theory of cataloguing—it has little as a foundational document for creating a cataloguing code. Never mind that the structure of bibliographic records set out in AACR2/ISBD is well established, accepted by scholars and other catalogue users for decades, and with minor flaws in concept and expression that could easily be corrected—it works in practice, but does it work in theory?