A few people including Sarah Houghton-Jan (Librarian in Black) and Carol Ou commented on a recent post I wrote comparing OCLC to Microsoft. Roy Tennant responded to this post on the hangingtogether blog, written by former RLG – now OCLC employees. Roy also responded to Carol Ou’s idea about FRBRizing local library catalog records for free. I thought I’d repost Carol’s original comment here along with Roy’s reply because I think this dialog deserves more attention and thought. Having it in the comments to that post may have effectively squashed the conversation:
Here is a portion of Carol’s original comment:
…One way OCLC could convince me that they’re truly a member organization though, with the best interests of libraries at heart, would be to FRBRize all their member libraries’ individual library catalogs for free. And I don’t mean via WorldCat local, but in analyzing our records per their algorithm and then handing those records back to us to do what we will. After all, the majority of the original bib records were created by individual library catalogers, and our fees certainly helped pay for any R&D. How about it, OCLC?
And here is Roy’s response:
That is an interesting idea, and one that may be worth pursuing if we can determine what, if anything, you would be able to do with these “FRBRized records” once they were produced for you. One of the problems is that our present integrated library systems (ILS) are mostly not set up to deal with such grouped records. We can’t simply hand you a smaller set of records than you gave us, that would be mostly useless. You need to have a system that can take advantage of FRBR relationships. In other words, although you can find out right now which items you have that may be related by using the OCLC xISBN service (see http://worldcat.org/affiliate/webservices/xisbn/app.jsp ), it is really more complicated than that. You may need to have a system that can deal with a grouped display but also allow someone to see the individual items that are part of that group. So although the initial idea is intriguing, I think it requires a bit more thought to be something that we could consider as a service to provide to our members. But I really want to know if this is something you could put to work today in your ILS, so if it is, let me know directly at roy_tennant@oclc.org. Thanks!
How about it, any readers who have an opinion on this proposal?
Thanks Steve. You’re right, I’d missed Roy’s response.
My thinking wasn’t that libraries would necessarily attempt to immediately load these FRBRized records into their ILS. Roy’s right in that it’s unlikely the majority of ILS, out of the box, would be able to take advantage of all the groupings and linkings. My thinking was that having a FRBRized set of our records returned to us would be helpful in terms of our own R&D, giving us a different perspective of our own records and our holdings. It’s hard to predict exactly what this local R&D might produce– but there are many exciting possibilities. In the province of serials, there’s the separate vs. single record cataloging debate– how might a FRBRized view of records encourage us to revisit our cataloging practices and perhaps decide to go back to catalog records and batch augment the 776 fields of those separate records with additional record data? Elsewhere, at the very least, there might be more informed collection analysis and development.
By the way, the 776 field for additional form is something that does exist and can be linked in current library systems. I’d say it’s underused, though, probably because they don’t tend to have the sweetest display in the OPAC.