[open-bibliography] OKFN blog: Bibliographica, an Introduction

Tue May 25 19:11:30 UTC 2010

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

>
>>  I guess my question at this point becomes, do we wring our hands and
> worry over the minutiae of making sure our horribly imperfect data maps
> perfectly to a theoretical, platonic ideal of what library data should be or
> can we just assume some fuzziness with the legacy data and start building
> things the best we can (without the architectural astronautics) with the
> stuff we've got now?  Is anybody really going to care, in the end, if the
> subjects have been asserted against what is really a manifestation?
>
>
> That's what the "general" attributes are for at the RDA registry. So you
> can grab properties from there without having them balled up with the WEMI
> entities. But in that case, it's best not to claim that your record/data
> represents a particular FRBR entity... it's best to ignore FRBR altogether,
> as most people do (and get along just fine without it).
>

But the idea behind FRBR isn't necessarily something that should just be
thrown away because it's complicated or we don't have all of the facts at
hand to completely fill out the model.  Perhaps it would be better to look
at this with some "frbr" (lowercase, as opposed to "FRBR") like vocabulary
(perhaps the one that Rob has kicked around or something like that) that
maintains the sorts of relationships that we need from FRBR (work group
sets, translations, adaptations, etc.) without getting sucked into the void
that FRBR(tm) insists upon.  Possibly the vocab.org frbr or Rob's concept
(or something new) could work as a "vernacular FRBR" that a non-librarian
could actually hope to implement and use.

-Ross.
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