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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-All? William Denton Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-All? ed. Patrick Le Boeuf. New York: The Haworth Information Press, 2005. 316p. $39.95 soft-cover (ISBN 0-7890-2799-3). Published simultaneously as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly v. 39, nos. 3/4, 2004 This collection is not the first thing one should read about Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), nor the second, but it is a good third. FRBR, defined in 1997 by a group at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), is a model that describes four tasks users perform in catalogs (find, identify, select, obtain) and three groups of entities they seek. Group 1 entities organize the various aspects of products of intellectual creation into a hierarchy: work, expression, manifestation, and item. A work (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon) and an expression (the words making up his final text for book form or the words of a translation) are abstract, while a manifestation (the whole print run of a particular edition) and an item (my copy or yours) are concrete. Group 2 entities are creators and owners: persons and corporate bodies. Group 3 entities are subjects: concepts, objects, events, and places. Group 1 and 2 entities can also be subjects. The first thing to read about FRBR is its definition, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report (K.G. Saur, 1998 and at http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/wgfrbr/finalreport.htm). The second is the recent draft of the related model FRAR, Functional Requirements for Authority Records: A Conceptual Model, released after this book (available for free at http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/wg-franar.htm). Both are clear, well-written, and comprehensive. Editor Patrick Le Boeuf (at the time the chair of the FRBR Review Group) organized 17 papers into four groups: the first covers the past and the future of FRBR; the second discusses how well FRBR applies to different sorts of works, beyond just basic books and music; the third is about implementation and is written by people who have built working FRBR systems; and the fourth is a single paper by Dick Miller about XOBIS (XML Organic Bibliographic Information Schema), a related model. Le Boeuf's introduction gives an overview of FRBR and the challenges it faces. The papers demonstrate the international acceptance of FRBR and its fundamental focus on users. FRBR is more popular every month. That growing acceptance causes the main problem with this book: parts of it are [End Page 231] already out of date. The first set of articles about the past and future contains Glenn Patton's "Extending FRBR to Authorities." It is a good introduction to the topic, but now the draft of the full FRAR report is available. Tom Delsey's "Modeling Subject Access: Extending the FRBR and FRANAR Conceptual Models" points out problems with FRBR and FRAR (formerly called FRANAR) that will need to be fixed and that FRSAR (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records, another FR acronym you will come to know) will need to address. Delsey's article needs to be considered in the light of the FRAR draft, as Stefann Gradmann's paper on FRBR and the Semantic Web needs to be considered now that FRBR is being independently adopted and used by that community. The second group of papers about FRBR's applicability to different kinds of things is interesting and thought-provoking. The FRBR model is immediately appealing to most readers, but it is not a detailed set of rules. Applications and implementations test the model and show where more work is needed. Expressions and aggregates (works made up of other works, such as anthologies and serials) are particularly difficult. Ketil Albertsen and Carol van Nuys' "Paradigma: FRBR and Digital Documents" describes a difficult application. A legal deposit act required the National Library of Norway to archive Norwegian and related Web sites, and it used FRBR to help organize them. This is a complicated job (What happens when a Web site owner changes the color but not the words of a section heading on a page containing text, graphics, and...