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?
Gorman’s RDA article is entertaining and makes some good observations about RDA’s horrific predicament; but his comments on providing access to electronic resources seem about 10 years out of date. He implies that only cataloguers — using AACR2, natch — can effectively organise web resources. Sites like Flickr, Amazon and YouTube seem to be unaware of this and have been busily getting on with the business of providing access for their users. Likewise, Google seems untroubled by the fact that it scores lowly on recall and precision scores. Actually, far from ‘providing 1,321,957 “hits” in random order’ it has made a successful business out of providing highly relevant hits at the top of its search results. I read somewhere that Larry Page said his measure of success in retrieval was not recall/precision but the user finding what they want in the shortest time possible.
Irvin
Comment by Irvin Flack — 11 December 2007 @ 1:42 am