Kevin M. Randall wrote: > The FRBR user tasks are: > > to find entities that > correspond to the user's stated search criteria > > to identify an entity > > to select an entity that > is appropriate to the user's needs > > to acquire or obtain > access to the entity described > > Those tasks are universal, have been so since the beginning of time, and I > simply cannot imagine that they will not remain so. They apply in > any kind > of environment,
First, we should read the user tasks more carefully: to find what? To find *entities* in various ways. The entities are: work, expression, manifestation, and item. Is this *really* what people ask for today, no matter what words they happen to use for these entities? When Cutter wrote his rules, he prefaced them with questions asked at the reference desk. "These are the questions asked," "This is how the catalog can help answer those questions," "And oh yes, it's an inventory tool as well." pretty much sums up what Cutter wrote. Here is a practical example of what I see as a modern reference question, the work involved and the power of the modern tools. I would love to point everybody to a scan of this book where he discusses this. I don't know the title, I don't know when it was published. All I remember (I think!) are a few words from his first question: "Do you have [some author's} book on the brain?" I may be mistaken in this, but this is the item I want. At one time I used these questions in a presentation, but the presentation is long gone. I don't want "works, expressions, manifestations, or items. Obviously, the catalog cannot help me in this quest. Since I have some experience, I have the feeling that somebody has scanned this item and it's on the web somewhere . I look in Google Books for "cutter brain cataloging" and get a few hundred items arranged in *irrelevance* order, and find nothing. Naturally, I check out his "Rules for a dictionary catalog," and don't find anything. I also check in the Internet Archive and find nothing. I make a preliminary conclusion that it may not be on the web, but my experience makes me feel it's there. (Searching in regular Google doesn't help) I think, "Well, Cutter was into that weird reformed spelling movement and maybe that's a problem." But I don't think so. Finally, out of the depths, somewhere, I think of American Memory, where I had seen some major works on libraries, but I can't remember the name of anything. I check the American Memory site, and something looks familiar: "Public libraries in the United States of America." from 1876. From here, there is a handy search box and search for Cutter, brain, cataloging, and find my page: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History-idx?type=turn&entit y=History.PublicLibs.p0577&q1=brain I didn't want a work, expression, manifestation or item. Certainly, I was searching--but searching for what? Extremely vague things based mainly on feelings. There was an identification function but nothing related to FRBR user tasks, and I guess there was a selection part (where I gave up on Google, etc.), while my "item" was a single page published over 100 years ago. This is just one example of what people do today--or at least what they want to do. And I did it all sitting in Rome, Italy. I didn't even have to get up from my chair. 20 years ago, I would have called this science fiction. On this page in "Public Libraries" Cutter cites the questions that were asked in the library around 1876, and the catalog was created to answer these kinds of questions. Are these the kinds of questions asked today? In my experience, quite rarely, but it would be important to get input from different reference librarians on this. It would be very interesting to compare the questions of today with the questions on the page from Cutter. Maybe it's already been done somewhere. The questions I am asked deal with parts of items much more than entire items, e.g. "I have an assignment on Saint Lucy" There's no books on Saint Lucy and encyclopedias aren't enough. My users need bits of books. Another type of question: "I need to update my book on [subject] and need anything new from the last 10 years." These are some of the reasons why I consider the FRBR user tasks to be quaint today. Things have just changed too much not to take into account the power of the new tools. FRBR was created before the really powerful full-text search engines. I have tremendous respect for our predecessors--maybe too much, but we live in the 21st century. We need to build some kind of tool that helps people with their work today. I am certainly not at all advocating the elimination of catalogs--anything but that!--but we must make them more relevant to today's realities. My basic fear is that we will retool to FRBR, make a huge brouhaha about it, spend a lot of money, do an incredible amount of work and retraining, and it will change absolutely nothing at all. I'm afraid our patrons still won't use it. Why would they? James Weinheimer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Director of Library and Information Services The American University of Rome Rome, Italy
