The genius of FRBR and FRAD

     The genius of FRBR and FRAD is the relationships that exist between the entities that are tracked in bibliographic and authority records. It was sensed by Cutter, expanded upon by Lubetzky, realized in FBBR and FRAD and finally functionally utilized by RDA. With the dawn of the Internet universal interoperability of databases would naturally have been a goal for any organization that collected, organized, maintained and shared large amounts of information. FRBR and FRAD are the first of the theoretical system-neutral models that elegantly “map the relationships” between the recorded data to match the search criteria of the users. The advocates of these conceptual models understand the need to control the input of data placed in a container that can be read and manipulated by a computer. 

      The first of these containers was the MARC record. As the software and hardware technologies that read and move content around the web evolve a standard that is flexible and easily encoded is needed. RDA fits the need by distributing data into “discrete data elements” allowing for easier encoding than the AARC2 standard.  Ultimately, RDA can be used to create resource databases that are machine-readable moving libraries away from the MARC record container. 

      I believe that all the effort to move information management towards models such as FRBR and FRAD are in anticipation of the Semantic Web. Machine-readable descriptive bibliographic and authority records that can explain what we know about the content of a record will allow a machine to process knowledge itself. If the goal of a catalog is to help the user “find, identify, select and obtain” relevant resources then information professionals should be preparing for the day when software can “intelligently” retrieve and present works of any type for every user.  

Universal Cataloguing System

      The on going struggle to organize the world’s information into a universal catalogue of knowledge has generated a variety of approaches. There are those who believe that interoperability on an international scale can only be achieved through a strict set of cataloging rules with a controlled vocabulary thesaurus such as the US National Library of Medicine MeSH. Another approach is a hierarchical set of metadata such as that used in Archives. Still others preach the utility of the user-created metadata of Folksonomies. 

      It would seem that one size does not fit all. This is best illustrated in the field of museum curation and the use of metadata to search and retrieve information. Museums must gather, maintain and organize information on the collections for the use of the museum and scholarly research as well as the general public. On one level the need for authenticity and completeness of content for example of preservation information is acute. Structured and controlled access points would better facilitate research and maintenance of art objects and artifacts. The investment in terms of time and cost to develop such a database is high. The question of how much information does the general public want or need to successfully utilize the museum holdings must also be addressed. Would the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set suffice to serve the general public? Or could user-generated metadata be incorporated to facilitate greater usage statistics? 

      It seems that the same problems of how to open a collection to all people plagued the information specialists of the 17^th and 18^th century as today. Gabriel Naude believed that a good library had two catalogues: one based on a systematic organization of disciplines and another that allowed an alphabetical search by author. I question whether a universal system for organizing and retrieving information is desirable, much less achievable.