Thrashing in the Fields

There are clues that tell us that a 'dialog' is out of control on a listserv.  Mine are (1) nested inclusion brackets and (2) "X wrote...y wrote" on successive lines. Recent discussions on the RDA listserv have tumbled deeply into that territory.

My contribution to the confusion includes the following assertions:

There is exactly one candidate for a content model that captures the relations among salient bibliographic entities that are needed to anchor library assets in the larger information sphere: FRBR.  It feels roughly right to most, though it would be unwise to underestimate the time we can (ill-afford) to spend on thrashing around in the details.

There are, unhappily, several candidates for syntactical models (variously called, schemas, data models, and abstract models). These models are indifferent to what is encoded; rather, they define the permissible structures that can be encoded (think of sentence diagramming).

To choose an idiom foreign to the Web for such encoding will assure the irrelevance of library data on the open Web. Recasting MARC in XML is, in my estimation, exactly such a choice.  It masquerades as Web-friendly, but the result is simply more-parseable confusion for any but cataloging geeks.

The strongest alternative candidate is the Dublin Core Abstract Model, born of a decade of wrangling about data models in the web-metadata context.  Please do not confuse the data model with the element set.  I am not suggesting supplanting MARC cataloging with DC.

I am asserting that embedding the library in the open Web demands:

1. A coherent model of what we are describing and the relationships among those entities, and in which each entity is identified with a URI (FRBR, or something very like it).
2. A carrier syntax that lives comfortably on the Web (the DC Abstract Model is my candidate)
3. Rules for populating agreed structures (that at which RDA seems to be failing so earnestly).

There is some urgency at agreeing on (1) and (2) before (3) can be achieved.  The recent Library of Congress Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control has committed the heresy (for some) of suggesting that RDA work be suspended and FRBR be subjected to more rigorous testing in order to increase the prospects of achieving our Web-destiny. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I am convinced that our objectives will not be met through wrangling on mailing lists.  A coherent, well-funded community-grounded research and development program is in order.  All the innovative OPACs, Web-services, and Web-2.0 social networks will avail us not if we fail to achieve this coherence.
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DC mavens will recognize the 'sentence diagramming' metaphor as originating with Tom Baker
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An early morning view from my rooms with a view in Seattle

Comments

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Thank you for your eminently rational contributions, I agree entirely.

Except I'm confused by your apparent sympathy with the Working Group reccommendations to suspend RDA work--although you're "not sure you'd go that far", you seem to be sympathetic.

To me, that particular recommendation is based on the explicit LACK of realization of, as you say, we have exactly ONE serious candidate for a content model, and that's FRBR, which is generally recognized as reasonably good enough to get started on.

That recommendation seems to instead be based on the fantasy that we need to spend lots of time 'testing' FRBR, at the end maybe deciding that FRBR is no good at all, or if deciding instead that FRBR can be salvaged that it can only be done so by extended "thrashing around in the details.". The fantasy that we can afford this at all!

In fact, I feel like you've expressed well the argument that I'd want to submit as comments to the Working Group as specifically _opposed_ to that reccommendation. (And I'd urge you do that).

To be sure, endless wrangling on listservs isn't going to do it. But then, what is? I think PART of what is is precisely the kind of work that RDA is going forward with! My comment to the Working Group is going to say that instead of reccommending that RDA work be suspended, they reccommend specifically that the RDA/DCAM joint task force on fitting RDA into DCAM be _funded_! That's what's in fact needed, and it's the opposite of suspending.