More about you-know-what
Your faithful correspondent continues to cover all things FRBR at the IFLA conference. At 4 PM there was a two-hour session about cataloguing with four presentations. I missed the first one, by Liz McKeen of Library and Archives Canada, but caught most of the second one, by Mirielle Huneault of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. Nothing FRBRy in her talk, as I recall.
Next up was Beacher Wiggins of the Library of Congress: “The Library of Congress Takes a Look at the Future of Bibliographic Control.” It was a review of WoGroFuBiCo and the LC’s response to it, and neatly summarized what had happened and why and the major points of the report. Naturally FRBR came up, given all of the business in WoGroFuBiCo about suspending work on RDA. Wiggins said FRBR wasn’t tested well yet, but had proven very useful in helping people understand things, and the RDA testing that will be done will test FRBR.
Finally Patrice Landry gave an overview talk: “IFLA to the Rescue: How Division IV (Bibliographic Control) Is Responding to New Issues in Bibliographic Control.” He is the chair of the division, and he went over what it has done in the last couple of decades and has on the go now. There was a lot. Of course FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, and FRBRoo were mentioned.
After that there were some questions from the audience, and FRBR (or RDA) came up in all of them. My former prof, Lynne Howarth, formerly a member of the FRBR Review Group, asked a good question about training and educating people to go into cataloguing and bibliographic control, and part of one of the answers from the panel was that students should be given a firm grounding in FRBR.
So there you have more excruciating minutiae about mentions of FRBR at this IFLA conference. FRBR is a part of every cataloguing discussion now, either directly or through RDA. It’s interesting to look back and see how things have developed over the last few years. Who knows where things will be in ten years, and how it and everything else about bibliographic control going on now will change things. As I’ve said before, things will only get freakier.