I have just been to a talk about FRBR- Functional Requirements for bibliographic records given by Natalie Schulz secretary of the RDA committee. Library cataloguers need to understand this (and anyone else need read no further) because next year the rules that all library cataloguers should use, at the moment called AACR2, will change and AACR2 will be replaced by RDA (Resource description and access). RDA includes lots of new concepts and a new vocabulary for speaking about records and many of these concepts and words have been developed through FRBR so it is important that cataloguers understand what these are.
The FRBR process was intiated at a seminar in Stockholm in 1990 let to an IFLA report in 1998. Those involved examined the issues of what minimum standards for records should be set, and to decide this they first had to examine what cataloguing was for and how these needs could be met.
They defined user tasks such as the identification and selection of material, and they identified different levels of works. One problem that they identified was that when someone talked about a 'book' for instance they could mean one of at least four things, which they called "entities." A books such as 'Madame Bovary' could be an abstract idealised form of the 1) work such as when a person said that a film was the film of the book, or 2) an expression of this such as a translation into English, or 3) a manifestation of this expression, such as a particular edition, or 4) an item, i.e. a particular copy of the book.
In most cases no problem arises because for 78% of records on WORLDCAT, for instance, there is only one manifestation of the work, however for 1% of works there are more than twenty manifestations, and on a worldwide scale that is a lot of records. So, for instance, for a work such as Beethoven's 5th there are many versions. Ideally catalogue records should express the relationships between these records. In most catalogues at the moment, if you searched for Beethoven's 5th symphony you would just get a long list of all the records, which will probably only display in one order. In an ideal world there would only be one initial record for the work, and then the various manifestations would be clustered together.
If the records were created in a relational database it would be easier to link records of manifestations together, also there would be less need for duplication of entry. However at the moment all cataloguing is still done using the MARC21 cataloguing language. Clustering can still be done using existing MARC21 records but displaying relationships depends on complicated algorithms being imposed on the existing data by an outside program such as Ex Libris Primo.
Examples of catalogues using FRBR include Oxford University's SOLO ) and a search for Madame Bovary in this database displays one record with a tag "this is one of 92 versions of this work". Click on the tag and you can then sort the 92 results by many ways (which vaguely relate to FRBR entities) such as language, date etc. A second example of a Furburised catalogue is the Academie Louvain's catalogue which displays various levels of entity as a tree structure (search it for "praise of folly" for instance)
There seems to be lots of blurb about it in the journal Liber See also my previous blog on the subject for details of official sites.
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