Bernhard Eversberg wrote: > Thus, considering that much of what FRBR promises is reality already
FRBR doesn't "promise" anything. It just describes what was always being done, and shaped into a model to help us better understand what was being done. The newer functionalities we are seeing, such as the faceting in Jim's Hamlet example, are real-world examples of the principles that FRBR describes. I highly suspect that there is a strong link between their development and the FRBR report. Even if FRBR hadn't been written, they very likely would have come about anyway, because FRBR isn't telling us "how to", it's telling us "what is"; the "what" that "is" was always there--we just see it more clearly through the FRBR report. And seeing it more clearly facilitates the development. If we don't need what FRBR talks about, then that means we must not need that stuff we find at http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3A%22shakespeare+william%22+ti%3Ahamlet&qt=results_page Might as well just tell OCLC "No thanks, take it away, please." If we don't need what FRBR talks about, then we don't need to know who the creator of a resource is, who published it, when it was published, what other resource it is related to, etc. Because that's all that FRBR is about. Please, everyone, stop seeing FRBR as a model for bibliographic records in a user display. That is NOT at all what it is. It is a model of the data underlying the bibliographic records. Those are very, very, very different things. Kevin M. Randall Principal Serials Cataloger Northwestern University Library k...@northwestern.edu (847) 491-2939 Proudly wearing the sensible shoes since 1978!
