[open-bibliography] FRBR examples

Weinheimer Jim j.weinheimer at aur.edu
Fri May 28 08:49:28 UTC 2010


Karen Coyle wrote:
<snip>
That is exactly what the OL page does. The page is derived from the data 
in the database. Whether or not it shows summaries or first lines is 
really up to the implementation, but it is essentially what you say: a 
query that brings the relevant records together. At that point, users 
can move in various directions. If you click on the subject
    http://openlibrary.org/subjects/ship_captains_in_fiction
from that page you go to a subject page that has a publishing timeline, 
and a lot of choices for next steps for the user. I think this should be 
the point of the library catalog (or any catalog for that matter), which 
is to help people discover things they might not have originally thought 
about.
</snip>

This is good since this display is generated and demands no real extra work to create from scratch. Of course, the formal FRBR work attributes will necessarily get thrown out. I still question the utility of the summary for Moby Dick. If you take that out, and the Lucene/Zebra indexing is applied to extract the headings, what are we left with? A traditional list of catalog records. It's nice; it's certainly an improvement over the traditional displays; but does this sort of display fit people's needs today?

The only way to find out would be to conduct research on different populations, but I would hazard the guess that mostly, it does not. For example, I can't imagine how my students would find this type of display to be of any practical help to them. Yet, when I ask myself what really would be of use, I find it far more difficult to find an answer.

I think I am too much into the traditional methods to figure this out and I would have to defer to outsiders. Nevertheless, the FRBR user tasks seem to me more irrelevant than ever.

James Weinheimer  j.weinheimer at aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992




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