Work, expression, manifestation, item … blog.
A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.
Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.
Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.
Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).
Diane Hillmann’s slides from her talk Facing Forward: The Challenges Facing Cataloging and Catalogers (2.4 MB PPT) are good reading. She covers what’s going on with RDA and how all this stuff (including FRBR) will work for the Semantic Web. Lots of examples and illustrations help to make it clear. It’ll be quite a change when cataloguers don’t enter a name, they enter a URI.
Well, I don’t think most catalogers will have to deal with the URI itself–most well-behaved systems will likely have the cataloger choose from some selection of possibilities, and will display the names and topics rather than a URI. The URI will go into the record, though, and be distributed in that form, and we won’t any longer be using the display names for identification AND display. The really neat thing about that, of course, is that the URI won’t change, even if the display name does (perhaps some additional bit of info is added to maintain uniqueness, or a death date is added–whatever).
Thanks for mentioning the slides though–and I’m glad you liked them!
Diane
Comment by Diane Hillmann — 30 October 2008 @ 8:58 pmJust to echo what Diane says – although I realise you said it in a light-hearted way, I think this is exactly the kind of thing some people fear – that rather than entering names cataloguers are going to need to look up, and then enter something of the nature of http://www.example.com/people/1234
I feel we are at a stage with the use of URIs in this context that existed in the early days of the web, where you wrote html in notepad, and put in all the tags by hand. It wasn’t until we got easy to use tools that web publishing really became possible for most people – and of course blogging tools are really the culmination of that.
We need to see rapid development of at least prototypes that demonstrate how a cataloguing system that uses URIs in place of literal values would work nicely, in order to diffuse some of the concerns – essentially so the people who actually do the work can stop worrying about the mechanics and get on with their job.
Comment by Owen Stephens — 5 November 2008 @ 11:52 amYou mentioned coding HTML by hand. In the future, might catalogers also be liberated from having to worry about knowing in great detail all the tags and subfields (or the behind the scenes stuff of MARC’s successor) that make up the typical record? I mean, all the tags and subfields already have English language equivalents. It would be great if say Connexion offered the option to turn the format inside out, that is, display and work with the English language equivalents of all those tags, etc. I already rely on the MARC field help to see what a tag or indicator value means in English. And the format has been translated in other languages, right? Some might find it easier to work with say the actual names of the various variant titles rather than worry about the exact coding of the tags and indicator values. This does not mean getting rid if the ability to create complex bibliographic structures, but if we were shielded from having to work directly with all the behind the scenes guts, then maybe cataloging would move faster and maybe coding errors would be reduced. Just a thought.
Comment by Bryan — 7 November 2008 @ 6:00 pm