The FRBR Blog

Karen Coyle sent out some e-mail yesterday about two new Dublin Core documents she’d written:

The first document is one I worked on — painfully, I must say — that attempts to explain the DC concept of Application Profiles. These are concepts we want to apply in the DC/RDA work, and my personal question to you all is: DOES THIS MAKE SENSE? Can we use this in our metadata environment? What’s missing, what doesn’t work, what needs clarification?

The first one is Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles (Working Draft), which she wrote with Thomas Baker.

When it comes to metadata, one size does not fit all. In fact, one size often does not even fit many. The metadata needs of particular communities and applications are very diverse. result is a great proliferation of metadata formats, even across applications that have metadata needs in common. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has addressed this providing a framework for designing a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) that meets specific application needs while providing semantic interoperability with other applications on the basis of globally defined vocabularies and models.

I like application profiles. They let you pick and choose from other metadata schemas so you have just what you need, and they let you add and change what you don’t want. And if someone says, “Hey, that’s not how MODS or CanCore do it,” you can say, “Get lost. I’m doing it my way, to serve local user needs.

Anyhoo, FRBR is mentioned in these guidelines, for example:

A set of functional requirements may include user tasks that must be supported such as the following from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)

Use the data to find materials that correspond to the user’s stated search criteria.

Use the data retrieved to identify an entity.

For the MyBookCase DCAP our functional requirements are:

Use the data to retrieve books with a title search.

Limit a search to a particular language.

Sort retrieved items by publication date.

Find items about a given subject.

Describe the author as a person with a name and email address.

Owen Stephens’s FRBRing RDA leads out of a lengthy discussion on the RDA-L mailing list possibly beginning with Kevin Randall’s FRBR User Tasks (was Alternatirves to AACR2/MARC21?). The thread breaks partway, so you’ll have to poke around the archives to find it all.

Secondly, I think FRBR and FRAD are OK, but I’m not sure they are really robust enough to base real world resource description on them. There are inconsistencies between FRBR and FRAD – see the discussion about ‘people’ from the DC-RDA listserv earlier this year. I think some of the things FRBR says about what counts as a separate Work are odd – e.g. two films of the same play are different works. I realise that others would disagree with me on this – which is fine, but seems an inevitable consequence of trying to apply a conceptual model in this way. Others have expressed their issues with the FRBR model in more detail and more eloquently than me – notably the work that Martha Yee has done.

Back in August I posted notes on what I saw at the IFLA 2008 conference in Quebec City. The official minutes of all of the Cataloguing Section meetings (244 KB PDF) are now online. It tells you what happened at all of the meetings (including the FRBR, FRSAR and FRAD meetings), who was there, and how they’re getting along doing what’s set out in their strategic plan.