03.05.2013 00:08, McCallum, Sally:
> Thanks to all for your comments and ideas over the last few months. The
> small team that we have called the Early Experimenters has prepared some
> discussion papers on difficult topics related to the BIBFRAME model and
> the developing draft vocabulary. Now we want to put these papers on
> bibframe.org and begin discussion on this listserv. By preparing
> background and recommendation papers we hope to help focus the
> discussion on the issues.
>
> The issues are some of the hard ones that all of us who deal with
> bibliographic data run into -- always. We are starting with the
> BIBFRAME Annotations paper, which you can find here:
>
> http://bibframe.org/documentation/annotations
>
...
While the Bibframe initiative is certainly a bold attempt, I must
admit to uneasy feelings about it:
1.
This paper:
http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/pdf/marcld-report-11-21-2012.pdf
is trying to say what it is all about. The description of the model
begins with some definitions:
Creative Work
- a resource reflecting a conceptual essence of the cataloging item
...
There is, however, nothing in this paper to say what a "resource" is,
nor an "item", or what "cataloging" means. While AACR2 notoriously
avoided a definition of "work", Bibframe shifts the difficulty to other
terms it leaves undefined. From the text, one can conclude only that a
"resource" is just about anything, but to be a work, it must have a
"conceptual essence". Of course it is very difficult, that much has
to be admitted. But are we to take St. Augustine's road and say that
if nobody asks, we know exactly what these terms mean, and only when
pressed for a definition we get into trouble?
2.
The relationship of Bibframe to RDA and MARC appears to be very
cloudy. Perhaps appropriately so since the Cloud apparently is
becoming the promised land for our troubled data resources. But
uneasiness here comes from the fact that the implementation of
RDA was to be tied in with "credible progress" being made toward
a successor for MARC21. Two questions:
A. Can Bibframe honestly already be called credible progress in
that sense, because "MARC21" means a lot more than just
an abstract data model: if means a format that actually works.
B. May it not just be that Bibframe turns out to model bibliographic
data in a very up-to-date way but that this new way diverges
a bit much from RDA logic and essence and thus will not
accomodate RDA data easily or reveal RDA as old-fashioned
and deficient as it is?
B.Eversberg
