[DCRB-L] WG1 (General Principles)

[manon.theroux at yale.edu]

My apologies for not commenting on Joe’s draft earlier. When I first
read it back in November, I scribbled down some notes in the margins but
never got around to writing them up and sending them off. Now I find
that others have already made most of the points that I intended to
make (especially about FRBR terminology vs. traditional bibliographic
terminology), so I will limit myself to just a couple of quick
FRBR-related comments on points that I don't think have come up yet. By
the way, I found the document very interesting and useful reading!


COMMENT #1. FRBR section 6.2 “Assessing Value Relative to User Tasks”
(and the tables that follow) might deserve a closer look from us. Here
is some text from that section describing the tables:

“Tables 6.1 through 6.4 list the attributes and relationships associated
with each of the four primary entities in the entity-relationship model
(i.e., work, expression, manifestation, and item). Plotted against each
attribute and relationship are the four generic user tasks (i.e., find,
identify, select, and obtain) .... The symbols used in the tables ...
indicate the relative value of each attribute or relationship in
supporting a specific user task focused on a particular entity... The
assessment of importance of each attribute or relationship to a
given user task ... was based in large part on the knowledge and
experience of the study group members and consultants, supplemented by
evidence in the library science literature gathered from empirical
research, as well as by assessments made by several experts outside the
study group.” 

Looking through these tables (which, by the way, are only available in
the PDF version of FRBR <http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf>), it
seems clear that users of rare materials will often place a higher value
on some of the entity attributes listed than what has been assigned to
them by the writers of FRBR. We might want to look through these tables
and identify those attributes that users of special collections tend to
value a little more highly than the average user.

The FRBR folks have already hinted at this in places (e.g. in Table 6.3,
footnotes on p. 93 and p. 94 point out that certain attributes may have
a higher value for early printed books). But in other places they have
not done so (e.g. in Table 6.4, attributes like “provenance” and “marks
and inscriptions” have no corresponding footnotes). 

In addition to assigning higher values to some of these attributes, we
might also see them as relevant to additional user tasks (e.g. in Table
6.4, the “provenance” attribute is assigned a value only for the
“identify” task but I think we would probably see it as relevant to the
“find” task as well. Our users sometimes want to be able to find all of
the items that have a particular provenance; we facilitate this by
making added entries).

Finally, we might be able to identify attributes that are missing from
the tables but are nonetheless important in cataloging rare materials
(e.g. in Table 6.4, there seems to be no attribute covering
item-specific binding information).

COMMENT #2. One weakness of FRBR is that it doesn’t really address the
concept of “genre” very well. Patrick Le Boeuf’s article, “FRBR and
Further,” goes into this a little more (Cataloging & Classification
Quarterly, vol. 32(4) 2001; see section 2.8.2.2 “subject vs. object
relations” on p. 26-28). 

Of course, genre isn’t a transcription issue but DCRB does advise
catalogers to bring out genre using notes so it is an issue relating
to description. These notes can support the “identify” and "select"
tasks. When used to justify tracings, they can also support the “find”
task. Come to think of it, they can support the “find” task even if
tracings are not made as long as one’s system allows keyword searching
of note fields.

-------------------------

Manon Théroux
Authority Control Librarian
Catalog Department
Yale University Library
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
(203)432-8376