Salutations,

The shoe analogy in the previous post reminded me about the importance of FRBR [Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records] as a conceptual metadata model. I found some notes I took when reading the Joudrey and Taylor (2018) text.

FRBR – pronounced by some as “fur-bur,” at least by those of us in library world who hail from Southern states – is an entity-relationship model [E-R model] (Joudrey & Taylor, p. 209). FRBR states users routinely engage in the following activities aided by catalogs:

• find,
• identify,
• select,
• obtain, and
• navigate (as cited in Joudrey & Taylor, p. 209).

When contemplating the user tasks, one can see that the user tasks of FRBR are related closely to both Cutter’s objectives of the catalog and the Paris Principles, both of which are mentioned in Joudrey and Taylor’s Chapter 2. There is a really awesome chart that illustrates how FRBR breaks entities down into three categories that are interconnected and hierarchical. Joudrey and Taylor use a pyramid to show the relationships among Group 1 entities specifically, that is between the concepts of work, expression, manifestation, and item. I took a screenshot when I had access to the text, so here it is (Joudrey & Taylor, p. 210).

In case the screenshot is fuzzy, here is the essence of what is being conveyed through the pyramid image, starting at the top and working downwards: A work is realized through one or more expressions. One or more expressions are embodied in one or more manifestations. A manifestation is exemplified by one or more items (Joudrey & Taylor, p. 210). I added bold for the verbs and italics for the nouns.

FRBR Pyramid, originally Figure 5.2 in textbook cited below.

RLGing,

Sarah Hope

PS. Loosely connective, the E-R model elements can be equated to basic grammar found in the textbook where entities are nouns, relationships are verbs, and attributes are adjectives and adverbs (Joudrey & Taylor, p. 206).

Reference

Joudrey, D. N. & Taylor, A. G. (with Wisser, K. M.). (2018). The organization of information (4th ed.). Libraries Unlimited.