06.12.2013 09:12, James Weinheimer:
I do believe that FRBR is "the main enemy" (to use your term). Why? Because everything, including RDA and the new formats, etc. all state explicitly that this is what they are aiming for, even though the model has never been proven to be what people want. Why should we assume that people want it? On the contrary, is there any evidence that people *do not* want FRBR? Yes, and it is highly significant.
We might briefly say, I think, that FRBR, even if we had all the legacy upgraded and FRBRIzed to the ultimate extent, this would cover only a small amount of use cases. The FRBR idea originated from the necessities of library houskeeping, not from an analysis of end-user requirements and expectations. Libraries need(ed) to be able to check their collections for the presence of other editions or translations before they ordered a copy of a new book, for instance. And such checks had to be efficient. This was and is everyday experience. This makes librarians think in a different way from end-users. They think in terms of large chunks of recorded knowledge, also called books. End-users think in terms of much smaller chunks: facts and figures, very specific questions mostly, and larger questions occasionally, and to some of these cases a book may be the answer. Such cases cases may profit from subject access to the opac (up to now no business of RDA's), the former - nowadays - only from search engines. And many more larger questions than ever before have now become answerable by online access, so that the former default, the library, has slipped from the public mind as a provider of answers. The default, for ever more searchers, is the activity now called googling. Only for questions and problems beyond that, libraries may remain a place of last resort, but RDA can certainly not be the life saver or the most important develeopment to keep libraries interesting. Thus, considering that much of what FRBR promises is reality already, as Jim has pointed out, the migration to RDA appears to be a waste of resources. Not only, but also because we are supposed to shell out hundreds of dollars per year just for the privilege to *read* those rules. B.Eversberg
