ABSTRACT Coyle's articulate treatment of the issues at hand helps bridge the divide between traditional cataloging practice and the algorithmic metadata approach, making this book an important resource for both LIS students and practitioners.
"This book looks at the ways that we define the things of the bibliographic world, and in particular how our bibliographic models reflect our technology and the assumed goals of libraries. There is, of course, a history behind this, as well as a present and a future. The first part of the book begins by looking at the concept of the 'work' in library cataloging theory, and how that concept has evolved since the mid-nineteenth century to date. Next it talks about models and technology, two areas that need to be understood before taking a long look at where we are today. It then examines the new bibliographic model called Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the technical and social goals that the FRBR Study Group was tasked to address. The FRBR entities are analyzed in some detail. Finally, FRBR as an entity-relation model is compared to a small set of Semantic Web vocabularies that can be seen as variants of the multi-entity bibliographic model that FRBR introduced"
