On 12/6/2013 7:12 PM, Kevin M Randall wrote:
<snip>
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
athttp://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.
</snip>
FRBR is not so benign, as I have tried to show and as many library
departments are beginning to understand. Accepting FRBR (and RDA) has
many implications, some of which are surprisingly huge. I think
everybody understands clearly that we are seeing only the very
beginnings of the ultimate costs of FRBR.
FRBR is actually an entity-relationship model that is used for setting
up a relational database. The very first step in making such a model is
to determine what people want to do with the database you are going to
make (i.e. figure out the "user tasks") and from there you can figure
out the entities, attributes and relationships in order to fulfill those
user tasks. This is fraught with many problems in today's environment,
but the very first part is supposed to demand working with the people
who will use it to find out what they want. The very simple fact is:
there was not any effort to figure out what the public wants to do with
information in a bibliographic database. The paper by Amanda Cossham
pointed this out clearly. It still hasn't been done! Here was a tool
that the public never cared for (the card catalog), then it was
transferred with almost no changes into another tool (the OPAC) where in
many ways it worked much worse than the original card catalog, and after
all of that, should it come as any surprise to discover that the public
abandoned the card catalogs/OPACs just as soon as they had a real choice
(keyword, full-text relevance ranking)? Does it then make any sense to
set out in relational database format what was "already being done" and
*has already been abandoned* by the public?
To be fair, the original version of FRBR came out before (or at least
not long afterward) the huge abandonment by the public of our OPACs.
Google had barely even begun to exist when FRBR appeared. Still, there
could have been a chapter on the newest developments back then. But even
today, nowhere in it is there the slightest mention of "keyword" or
"relevance ranking" much less anything about Web2.0 or the semantic web
or linked data or full-text or Lucene indexing (like what we see in the
Worldcat displays). It's as if those things never happened.
So, the purpose of the Worldcat search I demonstrated, where anybody can
do the FRBR user tasks for Shakespeare's Hamlet, isn't to conclude "No
thanks, take it away, please." It is to say that we don't need the
entire FRBR structure because what it envisions can be done *today*
*right now* with what we have and without the incredibly expensive
changes either to the content or to the format that FRBR demands. That
is a simple fact and it should be celebrated, with huge kudos going to
the programmers. As a rather incredible addition, the technology that
allow it is... *FREE*!! Instead it is ignored, to the detriment of the
entire cataloging community, with vast resources wasted to build
something that has already been done.
If some other purpose has replaced the FRBR user tasks, but still
demands the FRBR structures, whoever has decided that should let
everyone else know--and perhaps it could be.... debated?! As it stands
now, we must assume that huge resources are being used to create
something that has already been done, and done far more cheaply and
quickly, and perhaps, even better.
--
James Weinheimer weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
First Thus http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
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