Harry Potter and the various editions

William Denton writes in this post on the FRBR blog that Amigos Library Service is offering to its members the option of applying parts of the FRBR model to their WorldCat comparison.

Amigos Library Services says on its WorldCat Collection enhancements page that "Applying elements of FRBR groups various editions and formats of the same title together."

I jumped a little in my seat and said "Woo!" I woke MollyDog up and she wasn't amused. Then I realized that I had no idea, in any sort of practical way, what that meant.

I Googled "WorldCat comparison" and ended up at FirstSearch's help page where I learned that "A WorldCat comparison compares your Aggregated Group Analysis to all of WorldCat."

Okay, great, but what does that mean?

Next I found FirstSearch help's definition of Aggregated Group analysis and learned that "In an Aggregated Group analysis the combined titles of all member libraries, with duplicates removed, are presented as though the group were a single institution."

So if I'm reading this right, WorldCat comparison analyzes your library's holdings against other library's holdings so that you can see which titles you have are unique?

Add that to the idea that Amigos Library Services will help your library display these results in a FRBR-friendly way and what do we get?

Probably some very happy collection-analyzing librarians.

Let's take our old friend Harry Potter and his various editions. If you're trying to do collection analysis, it doesn't seem very useful to have to wade through all of the various editions to find out where you stack up. Unless it's a US vs. UK edition, I'm guessing that the differences have very little to do with content and more to do with presentation.

FRBR-izing your WorldCat collection analysis might be less useful for institutions or instances like Special Collections where the difference between editions is significant. This tool's usefulness might also depend on how many of your holdings are unique and how much of your collection consists of various editions of the same title.

For public libraries, I suspect that approach might quickly a big difference in how they do collection analysis. If you were analyzing your collection, this FRBR-ized approach would quickly give you a clearer picture of what you have in your collection. And by having that clearer picture, you would be better equipped to build on certain areas of your collection. Better collections mean librarians better equipped to help their users. Happy users means successful libraries.

It's not a one size fits all solution, so that display doesn't supersede your original display and Amigos Library Services doesn't force their members to adopt this display. But they are offering the option.

I think that by making easier the job of collection-analyzing librarians, you sell the idea of FRBR as way of looking at the relationships between items being displayed in your public catalog. It's a good way to get people other than catalogers and metadata specialists talking about FRBR. Furthermore, these discussions happen in a way that makes sense for people who don't speak Cataloging.

So good on you, Amigos Library Services, for finding a way to make collection analysis easier for your users.

-Erin