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).

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Hillmann, FRBR vs FRBR-ization

Posted by: William Denton, 21 July 2009 7:22 am
Categories: Blog Mentions

Diane Hillmann posted FRBR vs. FRBR-ization on the blog she does with Jon Phipps:

… In contrast, FRBR-ization only exposes what we can assert based on a mapping from MARC to FRBR (or RDA), which is at best the relationships between the FRBR Group 1 entities: the Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item. With the RDA array of identified relationships, we have a whole lot more. I suppose one could say that these are not necessarily part of the FRBR panoply, but if you consider them the “horizontal” relationships that fill in between the “vertical” relationships that Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item provide, then it’s possible to see how these relationships are enabled by the way the FRBR model has allowed us to rethink our world.

This is one of the issues that makes my head hurt when I think about the RDA “testing” regime that we keep hearing about. Are we wedded to the notion that if it can’t be crammed into MARC we aren’t going to use it? Can’t we start to think about MARC as a fairly lossy output format and move on to something that expresses the relationships we know will help us maintain some important functionality and credibility in the broader data world?

MARC as “a fairly lossy output format.” Preach it.