The FRBR Blog

Jonathan Rochkind, systems librarian at Johns Hopkins University posted State of FRBR on his blog Wednesday. He runs through some FRBR stuff that was on his mind, given a recent discussion on the RDA mailing list.

1) Even though FRBR with it’s four Group 1 entities is already considered too complicated by some people (who think we only need three, or two), it’s actually still only a modelled approximation of the complexity of our actual bibliographic/information universe. What we represent will neccesarily be one model, and an approximation….

I actually think we can likely be succesful in getting these other sources to follow the Work-Expression-Manifestation-Item model (because it is useful, and there is nothing competing), or else succesfully translate foreign data to this model. But we aren’t going to be succesful in forcing everyone everywhere to make the same decisions about exactly where work boundaries or expression boundaries are. So an unresolved question and useful research program is: How do we build systems that deal with integrating records from sources that have made _different_ decisions about where work boundaries or expression boundaries are?