FRBR Workshop

Wow! Wow, wow, wow, and WOW. I'm at the end of day 2 of a 2.5 day FRBR Workshop at OCLC, and I've been continuously blown away by the activity going on here. The workshop is supposed to be in large part a working session to start thinking about what revisions to the original FRBR report would look like. I was skeptical of that goal coming in, seeing as 75 people are here, but I've been extremely pleasantly surprised. If I've even been in a room with as many bright, engaged, and interesting people before, I didn't appreciate it at the time. Within the discussion, I find just the right balance of theory and practice, of idealism and realism. There's a very clear vision of what a bibliographic future could be, and a great many ideas for ways we can reach there in manageable steps.

The workshop itself is a mixture of presentations on specific topics and time to just talk. Some presentations don't at first glance look to be FRBR related, but every single one really does have a definite impact on how FRBR should develop in the future, either as a conceptual model or as some sort of implementation model based on the conceptual one. Some presentation slides are on the workshop site now, and hopefully all will eventually be. But the presentation slides in no way do the actual presentations and the resulting large- and small-group discussions justice. I feel more confident than at most meetings of this type that the discussions will have real results, in the form of writings and implementations. I sincerely hope so - many people out there are interested in this topic, and the best thing we can do now is share, share, and share some more.