Off the Mark

habitually probing generalist

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FRBR complexities

September 18th, 2006 · No Comments

FRBR is a fairly complex concept. In some cases, that is a complete understatement! [Short version from LOC. Long version from IFLA (pdf).]

Much work has been done to date, but it has been mostly restricted to prolific authors and composers and works with many expressions. This is important, as this is where FRBR is most useful. A single original monograph that is published in only one edition and one printing by an author who never writes another publshed work, nor is adapted, transformed, abridged, etc., is not going to be impacted by FRBR in any significant way.

More recently, folks are starting to look at other areas of importance to the FRBR model. In that vein, I recently read the following two articles:

Delsey, Tom. “Modeling Subject Access: Extending the FRBR and FRANAR Conceptual Models.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 39(3/4): 2005, pp. 49-61. doi: 10.1300/J104v39n03_04

Jones, Ed. “The FRBR Model as Applied to Continuing Resources.” Library Resources & Technical Services 49(4): October 2005, 227-242.

I recommend both of these articles if you have a basic understanding of FRBR (and if not, check out the “short version” above).

The Delsey article seems very well reasoned, but it relies heavily on the indecs model. I am not familiar enough with this model to decide if it should serve as a proper model to build a subject model within FRBR from. [There should be a less than and greater than sign around "indecs," like it is a tag or something, but WordPress is refusing to encode the less than sign and even removes the "in" following it when I put it in as either a numeric or named entity. I sure hope Dante reserved a special level of Hell for anyone naming their organization or project like a tag.]

The Jones article spends a good deal of effort to highlight the issues with continuing resources under the FRBR model. The first issue is that there are currently two concepts of work at play in continuing resources (content-based and title-based). Jones does a good job showing how we got to this point historically. He also demonstrates issues with “(2) the hierarchies used for expressing bibliographic resources; (3) the level of abstraction at which bibliographic resources are described; and (4) the varying techniques for expressing relationships among bibliographic resources” (228).

Check them out, you might learn something.

Tags: Cataloging · Librariana · Serials