[Web4lib] FRBR and beyond - can you draw it?

[Lars Aronsson]

Some of the ideas in FRBR are starting to become visible in 
websites like worldcat.org.

But we're still far from the future, and I think a limiting factor 
is in our imagination.  On worldcat.org, you still see a web page 
with one library catalog card on it.  There are some tabs for 
other editions, and the search result page groups the hits by 
author, language or publishing year.  But the result page is a 
still a flat list of hits, and each hit is a essentially a catalog 
card.  This is how we still imagine a library search website.

But imagine we could have a really big paper where we could draw a 
mind-map of how these editions are connected.  Limited versions of 
that vision are found in some FRBR slide presentations, but these 
slides are so small.

Clear the table, cover it with a really big, blank paper and grab 
the finest pencil.  This work was written by this author, edited 
and printed by this publisher.  Then this person translated it to 
that language.  This actor with a smooth voice recorded an audio 
book of it.  But the 2nd edition of that audio book contained some 
corrections.  The next printed edition had illustrations by this 
artist, who had previously also illustrated a work by author B.  
Authors A and B did not only have the same illustrator, but the 
same actor recorded audio books for booth.  After some years, the 
illustrator and audio book recording actor teamed up and formed a 
company, since they liked to work with the same authors.  Can you 
draw that?

Now imagine we're surfing over this huge paper, as if it was 
Google Maps.  It doesn't have to be entirely flat.  Subcategories 
could fold in and out, but at any one point we'd see more than 
just one library catalog card.  At the center of the screen might 
be one illustrated edition, but from there we'd see a line going 
to the illustrator and further on to the next book illustrated by 
the same person.  If we zoom out a bit, each edition becomes just 
a dot, but we could get a clearer view of the larger pattern of 
translations and adaptions.

Has anybody done even a demo, a prototype of this?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se