Patrick Le Boeuf - Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-All?

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR):
Hype or Cure-All?

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-All? has been co-published simultaneously as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Volume 39, Numbers 3/4 2005.

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR):
Hype or Cure-All?

Patrick Le Boeuf
Editor

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-All? has been co-published simultaneously as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Volume 39, Numbers 3/4 2005.

First published by

The Haworth Information Press , Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580 USA

The Haworth Information Press is an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580 USA

This edition published 2013 by Routledge

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Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-All? has been co-published simultaneously as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Volume 39, Numbers 3/4 2005.

2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The development, preparation, and publication of this work has been undertaken with great care. However, the publisher, employees, editors, and agents of The Haworth Press and all imprints of The Haworth Press, Inc., including The Haworth Medical Press and Pharmaceutical Products Press, are not responsible for any errors contained herein or for consequences that may ensue from use of materials or information contained in this work. Opinions expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily those of The Haworth Press, Inc. With regard to case studies, identities and circumstances of individuals discussed herein have been changed to protect confidentiality. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Kerry E. Mack.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR): hype or cure-all? / Patrick Le Boeuf, editor,

p. cm.

Co-published simultaneously as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Volume 39, Numbers 3/4 2005-T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7890-2798-6 (he. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-7890-2798-4 (he. : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7890-2799-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-7890-2799-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Cataloging. 2. BibliographyMethodology. 3. Machine-readable bibliographic data. 4. Information retrieval. 5. Information organization. I. Le Boeuf, Patrick. II. Cataloging & classification quarterly.

Z693 .F86 2005
025.3dc22

2004023990

About the Editor

Patrick Le Boeuf obtained the archiviste-palographe degree delivered by the cole nationale des chartes (Paris, France) in 1986, and he is currently Library Curator in the Department for Standardization at Bibliothque nationale de France. Mr. Le Boeuf has been a member of the IFLA Cataloguing Sections Standing Committee since 2001. Both his talk on FRBR, given in Boston, Massachusetts, on the occasion of the 2001 IFLA Conference, and his FRBR and Further article published in CCQ 32(4) in 2001, established his reputation as a FRBR commentator, and he was asked to chair the IFLA Working Group on FRBR (now renamed the FRBR Review Group) in 2002, a position he is still holding as of 2005. Mr. Le Boeuf also chairs the IFLA Working Group on FRBR/CRM Dialogue, a working group that aims at interoperability between the FRBR model for bibliographic information and the CIDOC CRM conceptual model for information about museum objects. He is frequently asked to give talks and lectures about FRBR, in France and abroad, and in October, 2003, at Richard P. Smiraglias invitation, he gave a talk on Musical Works in the FRBR Model at the ASIS&T (American Society for Information Science & Technology) Annual Conference in Long Beach, California.

Maja umer

This special volume is dedicated to Zlata Dimec (1955-2002), Slovenian librarian, cataloguer, researcher, colleague, and friend.

Zlata Dimec spent most of her career at the National and University Library in Ljubljana. Six years ago she transferred from her position in the Cataloging department to Research and Development, the department I was heading at that time, so there was ample opportunity to discuss with her the potential, possibilities, and challenges of the FRBR model.

Zlata gave me my first introduction to FRBR. She was very enthusiastic about the model, so much so that she prepared, at least to my knowledge, the first translation of the study into a language other than English.

During the following years, FRBR was very much the focus of her workand our discussions. She concentrated on the cataloguing aspects; I was giving more emphasis to the potential application aspects. We worked together on the use of FRBR for the IFLA study Guidelines for OPAC Displays. We planned our future research: Zlata as a seasoned librarian, I as a relative newcomer. We were both intrigued by the consequences of FRBR implementation, both for cataloguers and for end-users. At the same time, we were also engaged in a retrospective conversion project bridging the past and the future. I still remember how we analyzed the implementation of very old cataloguing rules and compared them to current theory and practicebeautiful, old handwritten cards and the FRBR computer catalog, two technologies aiming at the same goal. By that time, Zlata was already recognized as the most important cataloguing expert in Slovenia. She was working on an overview of Slovenian cataloguing rules and practice as a basis for the development of new cataloging rules.

She was a member of the IFLA Cataloguing Section Standing Committee and several working groups: Guidelines for OPAC Displays, ISBD(S) Revision, GARE Revision, and Multilingual Dictionary of Cataloguing Terms.

It was an extremely productive period for Zlata. She published several papers and, finally, also decided to formalize her knowledge and experience by acquiring an M.L.S. degree. It was a strange quirk of fate that she enrolled exactly on the day she learned of her illness.

But she did not give up. She continued to work even during her therapy and lengthy stays in the hospital. She finished her course assignments, and we were still making plans for future projects.

And then, on a winter morning two years ago, we learned that Zlata had passed away. We were suddenly facing what we stubbornly refused to believe possible. Zlata, with all her strength and energy, was gone.

We lost a colleague and a friend. Too many things were left undone and unsaid, so many plans unfulfilled. We never wrote the article on bibliographic relationships in UNIMARC and we never went to see The Lord of the Rings

I am deeply grateful for the time we spent together.

Maja umer, PhD, is affiliated with the Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Akereva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia (E-mail: ). She is a member of the IFLA FRBR Review Group, the IFLA WG on FRBR Teaching & Training, and the IFLA WG on the FRBR/CRM Dialogue.