>A small raft of documents have been produced lately as the library cataloging community heads toward implementation of new cataloging instructions and data models. Here is one attempt at a visualization of the changes that are happening, although it doesn’t show everything and there are doubtless far better ways to illustrate it. Nevertheless, here we go.
Wheeeeee!
(Brief guide for the perplexed: Numbers in circles 1-3 refer to classes of FRBR entities; circle 4 is for Annotations. The BIBFRAME initiative would, depending on how you look at it, either split class 1 or merge entities from within it, while classes 2 and 3 are merged and would link to authority records via, e.g., URIs. The column running down the middle with lines out from it represents what catalogers already work with, MARC, but shows how it aligns with FRBR entities following Tom Delsey’s 2006 report for NDMSO.)
(For the still perplexed: This is an overview of the structure of legacy library data, with a newly proposed abstraction layer that surrounds it, rather than merely replacing the data format alone.)
Update: A version that will hopefully serve as more user-friendly, albeit a bit more rough, here.
Cataloging Africana 