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A Review of “Implementing FRBR in Libraries: Key Issues and Future Directions”

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) dates from 1998, but Implementing FRBR in Libraries is only the fourth book on the subject, following a special issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly edited by Patrick Le Boeuf and published as Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR): Hype or Cure-all? (2005); Arlene Taylor’s collection Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools (2007); and FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (2007). Events have outstripped the book in two areas (Resource Description and Access (RDA) and the Semantic Web) but thorough research by the authors combined with the sedate pace of FRBR work means it is still accurate, complete, relevant, and useful. It has three goals: “to provide an overview of the current status of FRBR development, to identify the key FRBR issues that need to be addressed, and to point to future directions of FRBR development.” It succeeds on all three, most especially the first, in a very structured and methodical way. The book is one outgrowth of the 2006–2010 research project led by Zhang and Salaba, professors at the School of Library and Information Science at Kent State University: “FRBR-Based Systems to Effectively Support User Tasks and Facilitate Information Seeking” (http://frbr.slis.kent.edu/). Part of that work was a Delphi study (an iterative method of surveying experts in a field to arrive at a consensus of what is important), and they nicely integrate and summarize its results here. The survey is fully described in Zhang and Salaba’s “What Is Next for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records? A Delphi Study” (The Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (April 2009): 233–255) if the reader seeks more. The authors divide FRBR’s current state into five parts: the model itself and how it is reviewed and revised; FRBR-related standards such as RDA; how FRBR is applied to different materials and collections; FRBR-aware software and systems; and research and user studies. Each of those has its own chapter, and they are wrapped by introductory and concluding chapters.