Over on William Denton's excellent FRBR Blog, he mentions that 2 new books are coming out this fall on FRBR!
- Maxwell, Robert L. FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed
- Taylor, Arlene G. Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools
I'm very excited about tackling these 2 books when they come out. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with FRBR (which maybe I'll try to unpack someday on this blog). In 2004 I (insanely) offered to give an introductory presentation on FRBR, so I really dug in and studied it. But that was 3 years ago. Recently I dusted off FRBR and started to revisited it while reading the new FRBRized RDA draft (that's another post coming soon). Anyway, I'm definitely adding to my future of cataloging to-do list: Study FRBR (and hopefully learn to love it!)
I am looking forward to reading these books too. I'm surprised to see you write that you have a "love/hate relationship with FRBR." I do hope that you'll spell out what you have in mind in a future post--I'd be really interested in your thoughts on the pros and cons of FRBR.
Posted by: Cliff | Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 08:35 PM
What I mean by my "love/hate relationship with FRBR" is that it's a good conceptual model for online catalog displays, but I think it's hard to translate FRBR concepts to bibliographic record creation (the way we created them now). A cataloger is using an "item" to describe a "manifestation" and we will use things like uniform titles or notes to bring out the "work" or "expression" aspects, but the FRBR model as it is currently being applied to the draft of the new content standard, RDA, is adding a layer of conceptual complexity that the practical side of cataloging has never had to deal with before. This might be a good thing, I don't know.
Posted by: Chris Schwartz | Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at 06:41 AM