The FRBR Blog

Cataloger Scenarios from the DCMI/RDA Task Group (which Karen Coyle mentioned last week, because she’s part of it) is good reading.

These scenarios are intended to assist catalogers in visualizing how their work might flow in a setting that used RDA Vocabularies and FRBR relationships. The goal here is just to show how these packages of information might fit together and how catalogers can use their knowledge and experience in different contexts.

The fourth one, where a film cataloguer faces two DVDs with different versions of John Ford’s The Iron Horse, is a riot.

She also has to link to the Ford at Fox set somehow for the series. Jane thinks this is manifestation information, and is unsure how the linkage will work between individually cataloged manifestations and the set, which presumably has work, expression, and manifestation records.

Jane has now spent two days cataloging this resource. Her boss calls her into her office to explain why she should spend so much time and money playing with her records when they could just outsource it to India. Jane goes back to her desk and looks at the next time in her pile, which is a videodisc containing 30 short films by filmmaker Dennis Oppenheim. The one under that is a disc 60 short animated films by a variety of people she’s never heard of. Next is the second volume with another 60 films. She contemplates the idea of work records for these, then goes home and slits her wrists.