FRBR is indeed about both. It is a conceptual model of the bibliographic universe: entities, their attributes, the relationships between them.
Perhaps the relationships aspect of FRBR receives the most attention because it is the aspect represented least well in our current cataloging corpus. I see the OpenFRBR idea as indeed being to create this sort of open database of bib data that people are talking about as "OpenMARC", although I guess OpenFRBR wouldn't be about MARC neccesarily. What are the pros and cons of storing the data in MARC? Nevermind, I dont' even want to have that conversation again, we already did that. [But I think MARC is _probably_, generally capable of representing fully FRBR-congruent data. The way it's used just _isn't_ that way, and isn't used consistently in some areas of importance. There might actually be value in using MARC in an OpenFRBR experiment precisely to identify: Possibly ways to represent FRBR data in MARC, if applied consistently; and the (probably minority) of areas in which MARC is _not_ sufficient to represent FRBR-congruent data. Of course, at the moment, OpenFRBR is just an idea, so it's all things to all people. We'll see what things to what people it ends up being, I hope.] Jonathan Kevin Kierans wrote:
OpenMARC-like tool would be GREAT! But isn't FRBR about the relationships between things, not the things themselves? (Not that we can't do both!) Kevin
-- Jonathan Rochkind Sr. Programmer/Analyst The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu
