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FRBR, RDA and Law Libraries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2015

Abstract

Over the past few years the cataloguing community has seen radical changes in cataloguing standards, changes which appear to have been largely ignored by legal information professionals. This is a mistake according to Helen Doyle; the new cataloguing model can have enormous implications for the legal community, particularly in the spheres of information and knowledge management, and the profession is missing a huge opportunity by ignoring it. A new cataloguing standard (RDA) has been developed based on an alternative theoretical approach, known as “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR). FRBR seeks to change the way we approach the bibliographic universe: from stand-alone, individual repositories of information to networks of linked data built on a structured hierarchy. Commercial law firms are constantly trying to make connections between their traditional resources, online repositories, internal know-how, etc, but struggle to achieve complete synchronicity. FRBR provides a solution to this knowledge management problem: all resources (including people, events and subjects) become searchable, and because everything is linked, users can access information by navigating to it, establishing their own pathway through the data. Moreover, the major legal databases are already utilising linked data in this way – it is time for law firms to catch up.

Type
Selection of Papers from the Biall Conference 2015
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2015. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 

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References

Footnotes

1 IFLA 1998: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, Final Report. Accessed from http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr1.htm on 18/09/2015.

2 Pride and Prejudice was chosen as an example due to the success of the first so-called ‘Jane-athon’ held on January 30, 2015 at the ALA MidWinter Conference in Chicago, USA – a hackathon where librarians attempted to create RDA data from scratch using the works of Jane Austen as the subject matter. See <http://www.rdatoolkit.org/janein> for further information.

3 IFLA Final report, ibid, section 3.2.1.

4 IFLA Final Report, ibid, section 3.2.2.

5 IFLA Final Report, ibid, section 3.2.3.

6 IFLA Final Report, ibid, section 3.2.4.