My thinking wasn’t that libraries would necessarily attempt to immediately load these FRBRized records into their ILS. Roy’s right in that it’s unlikely the majority of ILS, out of the box, would be able to take advantage of all the groupings and linkings. My thinking was that having a FRBRized set of our records returned to us would be helpful in terms of our own R&D, giving us a different perspective of our own records and our holdings. It’s hard to predict exactly what this local R&D might produce– but there are many exciting possibilities. In the province of serials, there’s the separate vs. single record cataloging debate– how might a FRBRized view of records encourage us to revisit our cataloging practices and perhaps decide to go back to catalog records and batch augment the 776 fields of those separate records with additional record data? Elsewhere, at the very least, there might be more informed collection analysis and development.

By the way, the 776 field for additional form is something that does exist and can be linked in current library systems. I’d say it’s underused, though, probably because they don’t tend to have the sweetest display in the OPAC.