{"id":22,"date":"2009-07-18T11:35:15","date_gmt":"2009-07-18T16:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/managemetadata.org\/blog\/2009\/07\/18\/frbr-vs-frbr-ization\/"},"modified":"2009-07-18T11:35:15","modified_gmt":"2009-07-18T16:35:15","slug":"frbr-vs-frbr-ization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/18\/frbr-vs-frbr-ization\/","title":{"rendered":"FRBR vs. FRBR-ization"},"content":{"rendered":"

ALA Annual in Chicago has been a blur\u2014I did three presentations (which I hope to talk about and link to slides as time permits). But one issue has been rolling over in my mind ever since I blurted something about it at my first presentation<\/a> on Friday of Annual, when I was last up on a panel about \u201cThe Future of MARC.\u201d Rebecca Guenther of LC spoke about the efforts to keep MARC relevant and Ted Fons of OCLC covered similar topics from the viewpoint of \u201cThe Big O\u201d (thanks to Karen Schneider for that wonderful appellation!) A feature of both talks was the idea that reorganizing MARC records into \u201cFRBR-ized\u201d views was really all that was needed to take advantage of FRBR. I argued at that time that this was not the case, and as I think more about it I\u2019m more convinced it\u2019s true: FRBR-ization is not the same as using FRBR in native RDA.<\/p>\n

Part of my view is based on the differences between RDA and MARC semantics (not syntax, which is where the conversation usually goes). One of the most overlooked aspects of RDA in general is the rich vocabulary of relationships that it brings to the table for use in bibliographic description. Most people who\u2019ve focused on RDA as a textual guidance or set of rules have overlooked this, because the relationship vocabulary appears in appendices, and most of us don\u2019t consider appendices the most important part of anything. But consider this: in the RDA Vocabularies, each of these relationships has an identifier, is part of a hierarchy that allows expression of bibliographic relationships at several levels, and gives us the ability to use these relationships to navigate the bibliographic landscape without having to delve into records and interpret the text notes we\u2019ve used for the same purpose in MARC. For instance, using RDA you can say that \u2018Resource X\u2019 is an abridgment of \u2018Resource Y\u2019 (and that \u2018Resource Y\u2019 has an abridged version in \u2018Resource X\u2019) in a way that a system can expose to the user with no muss or fuss. The relationship is specific, identified and explicitly defined if anybody needs that to apply or interpret it.<\/p>\n

In contrast, FRBR-ization only exposes what we can assert based on a mapping from MARC to FRBR (or RDA), which is at best the relationships between the FRBR Group 1 entities: the Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item. With the RDA array of identified relationships, we have a whole lot more. I suppose one could say that these are not necessarily part of the FRBR panoply, but if you consider them the \u201chorizontal\u201d relationships that fill in between the \u201cvertical\u201d relationships that Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item provide, then it’s possible to see how these relationships are enabled by the way the FRBR model has allowed us to rethink our world.<\/p>\n

This is one of the issues that makes my head hurt when I think about the RDA “testing” regime that we keep hearing about. Are we wedded to the notion that if it can’t be crammed into MARC we aren’t going to use it? Can’t we start to think about MARC as a fairly lossy output format and move on to something that expresses the relationships we know will help us maintain some important functionality and credibility in the broader data world? As Jennifer Bowen and the eXtensible Catalog folks have discovered as they build the services to transform MARC into RDA (see my post on Jennifer’s paper<\/a> for more about that) transforming MARC to RDA represents a fundamentally different set of problems and trade-offs than going the other way. [By the way, the XC Project was everywhere at Annual–go Jennifer!]<\/p>\n

And as more vendors step up to the RDA plate and begin to build applications that start with RDA rather than try and transform MARC into something that could be mistaken for RDA only in dim light, we’re going to have to accept the fact that like any other metadata mapping, there is no such thing as a free lunch or a round trip.<\/p>\n

The Registry has some of these relationships registered already (see \u201cRDA Roles<\/a>\u201d for the relationships between FRBR Group 1 and Group 2 and \u201cRDA Relationships for Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Items<\/a>\u201d for the relationships between Group 1 entities), but be aware that these are not yet the final versions. I haven\u2019t gotten the information yet about the final changes to allow me to make those updates, but when I do I\u2019ll make an announcement to that effect. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ALA Annual in Chicago has been a blur\u2014I did three presentations (which I hope to talk about and link to slides as time permits). But one issue has been rolling over in my mind ever since I blurted something about it at my first presentation on Friday of Annual, when I was last up on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futures","category-presentations","category-rda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/managemetadata.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}