Re: is FRBR relevant?

Quoting Ross Singer <ross.singer@talis.com>:

> Karen, I generally agree with this summary but would amend it slightly.
>  Instead of:
>
> "You code an mp3 as a song, not as a file."
>
> I'd say:
>
> "You code an mp3 /first/ as a song and then as a file.  Then link the file
> resource to the song resource (but probably not the other way around)."

I agree. Even better, I should have said that you *catalog* an mp3 as  
a song (symphony, whatever), and you include information about the  
physical format as the "carrier" part of the cataloging. We're back in  
the "content v. carrier" discussion that is part of the library  
cataloging discussion. (This came up a lot in early discussions of  
digitization, where some folks wanted to catalog the digital file and  
list the person who did the digitizing as the author. In the end, no  
one found this a useful approach.)

Not that this is universal... in some contexts, the carrier is primary  
(this can be true some times in archives, I believe). And note that I  
am only referring to recorded information here -- of the kind that  
libraries manage. I think that if we insist that our metadata models  
can work for *any* kind of metadata, we'll set ourselves an impossible  
goal. Scientific data (genome, etc.), data sets (census, etc.) and  
other things that may be covered by metadata have other requirements  
and a different set of user behaviors. We shouldn't compromise service  
to our users in an attempt to stretch our metadata beyond our own  
boundaries.

What this gets down to is the goals you have for your metadata. I  
don't want us to lose site of the goal of serving information seekers.  
I should emphasize that these are *human* information seekers. While  
we need our metadata to be processed by machines, the machine is a  
conduit, not the end-user (at least in my context).

kc

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Thursday, 12 August 2010 15:38:07 UTC