{"id":21,"date":"2008-11-03T13:09:37","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T20:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=21"},"modified":"2008-11-03T13:09:37","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T20:09:37","slug":"frbring-rda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2008\/11\/frbring-rda\/","title":{"rendered":"FRBRing RDA"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been quite a bit of traffic on the RDA-L listserv<\/a> which essentially became a debate on whether RDA was needed, and whether MARC was so bad after all.<\/p>\n

I struggle with discussion about RDA and related areas of FRBR and FRAD, and have wished out loud (more than once) for a ‘Dummies guide’ that would explain it all in easily digestible chunks.<\/p>\n

I’ve also struggled with the recent discussion on the RDA-L listserv since so much of it is along the lines of “There is nothing wrong with MARC – so what’s the point in changing”.<\/p>\n

I have concerns about RDA, and about FRBR and FRAD – but I find the argument that we don’t need to implement them because MARC is fine just as it is depressing – if there is one thing I’m pretty sure of, it is that MARC is not OK. MARC is so not OK for where we need to be now with metadata that I don’t really know where to start. The issues with MARC have also been widely discussed on the NGC4LIB listserv<\/a>, and rehashing the arguments again seemed pointless – so I didn’t bother joining in the discussion, leaving others to fight it out.<\/p>\n

However, I did have a private correspondence with one of the participants, and I thought I ought to put some of the thoughts I expressed there into a blog post – both to air them publicly, and so I know where I’ve put them.<\/p>\n

I should probably start by saying that I don’t regard myself as an expert in the area of metadata, so I’m quite happy to be corrected if I’ve misapprehended anything. I have to admit that I’m not even quite sure that my ‘problems’ with RDA are really actually anything to do with RDA, but perhaps more to do with how it is likely to be implemented.<\/p>\n

I guess that the main issue that I have is that if we are really going to change the ‘silo’ nature of library data, we need a system of metadata that embraces linked data as a fundamental principal. As far as I can see, RDA does not do this. Although it does open up the possibilities of linking data, it doesn’t make it fundamental – and I believe it really needs to.<\/p>\n

I can see that some of RDA – the work done by Diane Hillman, Karen Coyle et al<\/a> on vocabularies – sets up the possibility of using linked data – but I just don’t think it is going to be enough. I’m very supportive of this work, and think it may be our best chance for RDA to realise some of its potential. However, the risk that I see is that RDA is implemented, but fundamentally not much changes.<\/p>\n

The other problem that I have is that RDA is ‘based on’ FRBR and FRAD – and although I very much believe in the concepts behind FRBR and FRAD, I’m worried by some aspects of using them as the basis for RDA. For a start, I’m not convinced that having a conceptual model necessarily means we should bake the conceptual entities into our Resource Description rules<\/p>\n

Secondly, I think FRBR and FRAD are OK, but I’m not sure they are really robust enough to base real world resource description on them. There are inconsistencies between FRBR and FRAD – see the discussion about ‘people’ from the DC-RDA listserv<\/a> earlier this year. I think some of the things FRBR says about what counts as a separate Work are odd – e.g. two films of the same play are different works. I realise that others would disagree with me on this – which is fine, but seems an inevitable consequence of trying to apply a conceptual model in this way. Others have expressed their issues with the FRBR model in more detail and more eloquently than me – notably the work that Martha Yee has done<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I guess the way I would put this is that I believe we should create Resource Descriptions in such a way that it is possible to view them in a FRBRised way. I don’t think this is the same as starting with FRBR as a way of describing resources. I have to admit to being in two minds about this – sometimes I am convinced of the strength of the FRBR entities as fundamental to how we catalogue, and sometimes I feel that we should focus on FRBR at the presentation end, not at the resource description end. I guess that what I am sure about is that a Resource Description framework has to support the ability to display things in a FRBRized display (much more than the current situation), but I’m not sure that cataloguing in a FRBRized way is necessary to achieve this.<\/p>\n

If these concerns all seem a bit hand-wavy and general, then I apologise – it is because they are. It could be that a good real-world implementation of RDA will overcome my concerns – but realistically I think we will see the minimum effort expended, with maximum backwards compatibility, and that will result in something that isn’t much more than MARC + AACR3 \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

My own (vague and not at all thought through!) vision of how resource description should work is that it needs to embrace the concepts of ‘linking’ and ‘crawling’ (and is, I guess, semantic web-ish at heart). Always link when you can, and ‘crawl’ the data to build your catalogue and indexes. The way I think about it, library ‘catalogues’ would become a bit like the Google ‘copy’ of the internet – built by crawling a web of data – however, by taking advantage of the structured data available in catalogue records, it could provide more than just keyword searching.<\/p>\n

I suspect that some of the ideas here need more thinking through, and expansion, but hopefully this is enough for now as a basis for more thought and discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been quite a bit of traffic on the RDA-L listserv which essentially became a debate on whether RDA was needed, and whether MARC was so bad after all. I struggle with discussion about RDA and related areas of FRBR and FRAD, and have wished out loud (more than once) for a ‘Dummies guide’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}