Re: is FRBR relevant?

Quoting William Waites <william.waites@okfn.org>:

> On 10-08-09 12:19, Jodi Schneider wrote:
>>
>> What happens when the LCSH heading changes?
>
> Does this happen? How is this handled now? Do
> libraries have to go and redo their entire
> catalogues?

It depends on the capabilities of your software. In some cases, you  
have to do a search to retrieve records with the old heading and then  
edit those manually. In the (rare?) case where you have your authority  
file  and bibliographic file are linked on the headings, the software  
may be able to do a global replace after the authority heading is  
updated. (This is where using strings rather than identifiers is a  
real pain -- even when linked, the string in the bibliographic record  
has to be replaced in most systems. It can lead to a lot of churn in  
updating and indexing of records.)

Some libraries rely on OCLC or other vendors to do this for them: the  
vendor updates the bibliographic records in its database, and the  
libraries are notified that they can download a file of changed  
bibliographic (and perhaps authority) records that will replace their  
own. That would be a snap, relatively speaking, except that many  
libraries will have made changes to the local version of the  
bibliographic record so they can't just do a simple delete/replace,  
but have to either make a record-by-record decision, or have to (often  
manually) copy over the new subject headings.

Yes, it's ugly. Using identifiers would help with some of this, but  
only if we stopped storing the display forms in the bibliographic  
record. We also need to be able to update individual fields -- MARC is  
designed to take a full record replace, and I don't know if there are  
many systems that can update individual fields.

kc




>
> I'm just guessing but I would think that they
> would add headings from time to time but they
> would rarely if ever delete or change an existing
> one. Although I could be very wrong...
>
> Cheers,
> -w
>
> --
> William Waites           <william.waites@okfn.org>
> Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
> Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK
>
> RDF Indexing, Clustering and Inferencing in Python
> 		http://ordf.org/
>
>



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

Received on Monday, 9 August 2010 14:38:40 UTC