So I think of RDA as continuing that work in progress, of fleshing out and formalizing things further. So I’m not sure it’s quite right/useful to say “those things aren’t FRBR, but RDA” — I think FRBR, at least as contained in the report, is more of an _approach_ than a formal model. And RDA is an attempt to make it into a bit more of a formal model. Which is a good thing.

But it’s worth pointing that out, as you do, that RDA does indeed have more specifics than the model in the FRBR report alone.

First and foremost, FRBR does not rely on the stand alone bibliographic record as we know it. MARC relies on the concept of bibliographic records just like cards. FRBR relies on clustering related data.

Until we fully understand what this change in the shape of the data means I think the effort that will be spend training folks to shoehorn RDA data into standard MARC records is not going to result in what FRBR promises.

Anyway, in my trying-to-twist-my-head-around-this way, I’m agreeing with you … I think.

Thanks for the pointer to the Schneider/Denton Code4Lib presentation–it does make one of my points much better than I did! The other point, though, is that there are a plethora of relationships between the FRBR entities that aren’t FRBR, but RDA, and you don’t get those either with a FRBR-ization strategy. It’s those relationships that are largely overlooked when people think about RDA and what it buys us.

What We Talk About When We Talk About FRBR
video: http://code4lib.org/conference/2009/schneider
slides: http://code4lib.org/files/frbr_code4lib09.pdf