Tuesday, July 19, 2005

TS-SIS Demo: Strategize and FRBRize your OPAC

Claudia Conrad discussing FRBR.
Yael Mandelstam introduced Claudia Conrad of Innovative Interfaces Inc. Claudia noted that the slides for the program will be posted on the III site and available to all III members. Non-III members should contact an III member and get them to download the slides for them, if interested. (Claudia stated that this would be fine.)
Innovative’s approach to FRBR is to leave the MARC record alone, but to use it to generate “keys” which are then combined to create the FRBR record. Claudia gave a version of this program in San Francisco this spring at the IUG meeting, but here she applied III’s FRBRization to a legal example, in this case Blackstone’s Commentaries. This was an interesting example because there are some copies of Blackstone’s Commentaries which are just that, and there are other’s which also include bits of early state law. The one we saw also included laws of Virgina. Most likely, we would want these two differing things to exist as two different Manifestations. The fact that III’s FRBRization mechanism didn’t work especially well in this case is less a statement about the mechanism (which actually works well on materials with well defined uniform titles, like music, or the works of Shakespeare) than about our need for better collocation. Nonetheless, with some thought and preparation it can work, and it was interesting to see how FRBR will look in our catalogs.
This program was put together by Yael Mandelstam and Keiko Okuhara.