MONTREAL — The Jewish Public Library (JPL) is about to become the first public library in the world to adopt a radically new cataloguing system that it says will make it easier to find exactly the book or other material sought.
The JPL will, in fact, be only the second library of any kind (the first was a Belgian academic institution) to switch to FRBR/RDA, an acronym commonly used for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records/Resource Description and Access.
This system ferrets out the not always obvious relationships among diverse resources in the database by describing a collection in an entirely new way.
FRBR/RDA is especially suited to the JPL because its close to 200,000-item collection is in five principal languages, said Eddie Paul, head of bibliographic and information services. Many of its titles are available in multiple editions and translations.
The system links resources in whatever language or form they are in, whether print or audiovisual.
The system is also a boon to a library specializing in Judaica.
“For example, we have a thousand works of the Bible, Talmud and other core Jewish canonical works in various forms, subsections, editions, portions and translations,” Paul said. Depending on their religious or cultural backgrounds, people frequently ask for these works by different names.
“It becomes difficult for them to find the works by themselves without the mediation of a reference librarian.”
When fully operational, the system will enable users to link, for example, the oldest book in the JPL collection, The Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus, written in Latin in 1481, to its newest edition, Iudeiskaia voina, published in Russian in Moscow in 1996.
Implementation of the new system will begin in February and take three or four months to complete, Paul said. “It involves a massive retraining of the cataloguers.”
The new system will be available online.
Just how ahead of the curve the JPL is can be appreciated when it is realized that even the Library of Congress is only starting to organize its new acquisitions under RDA rules, but is not using the FRBR data model yet, Paul pointed out. Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque is considering phasing in RDA next year.
FRBR/RDA is built on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules – Second Edition (AACR2), the standard in the English-speaking world for more than 40 years.
In Paul’s opinion, AACR was outdated a decade after its introduction. “It’s inflexible and not as user-friendly, intuitively and visually, as FRBR/RDA.”
FRBR/RDA has caused “quite a stir in the library community,” and there continues to be considerable resistance to its adoption, said Paul, who attributes this to discomfort with change rather than objective assessment of its value.
He predicts it will be only a few years before FRBR/RDA becomes standard.
The software, Virtua ILS, is made by only one company in the world: VTLS Inc. of Blacksburg, Va. Its acquisition at the JPL has been made possible by a private donation, said Paul who encouraged the JPL to make the bold leap.
“The JPL turns 100 in 2014 and, as a kind of birthday gift to ourselves, we are adamantly expressing our youthful ambition to remain contemporary and on the cutting edge of integrated library services technology, while at the same time trying to balance precarious budgets and the rapidly shifting ways in which people read and incorporate information,” he said.
The JPL’s collection is primarily in English, French, Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian, but it also includes many items in dozens of other languages, among them Polish, German, Spanish, Ladino and Aramaic.
In addition to adult and children’s literature, it encompasses the humanities, social sciences, the arts, language, science, and Judaism and Jewish intellectual thought.
“By bibliographically linking many of these works, I’m hoping this will empower users to the point where they will be able to find these works much more easily and with much less frustration,” Paul said.