The FRBR Blog

Works in RDF at Open Library

There is now a functioning RDF for Works, said Karen Coyle, pointing to http://openlibrary.org/works/OL6037025W.rdf and http://openlibrary.org/works/OL1073963W.rdf as examples. Yes, that’s RDF expressed in raw XML, and it’s ugly to read, but you’re not meant to read it with your eye, it’s meant for machines. And now there’s Work-level linked data at the Open Library!

Hellman, What IS an eBook, Anyway

What IS an eBook, Anyway?, asked Eric Hellman. Does each different format of an ebook require a different ISBN? Apparently the answer is yes. Hellman agrees, and goes into some detail about the whole issue, saying “the ISBN is just a solution to a problem: ‘How does an item get tracked through the book supply chain?’” Things get FRBRy in the comments.

On Twitter, Hellman (@gluejar) said, I usually get work, expression and manifestation confused. Must be a manifestation of working too hard on my expression.

Powell, Finding e-Books — A Discovery to Delivery Problem

Andy Powell’s blog post Finding e-Books — A Discovery to Delivery Problem follows nicely on that, in a long post from which I excerpt this juicy bit:

But, let’s ignore that for now [the question of what is an e-book] … we know that OCLC’s xISBN service allows us to navigate different editions of the same book (I’m desperately trying not to drop into FRBR-speak here). Taking a quick look at the API documentation for xISBN yesterday, I noticed that the metadata returned for each ISBN can include both the fact that something is a ‘Book’ and that it is ‘Digital’ (form == ‘BA’ && form == ‘DA’) – that sounds like the working definition of an e-book to me (at least for the time being) – as well as listing the ISBNs for all the other editions/formats of the same book. So I knocked together a quick demonstrator. The result is e-Book Finder and you are welcome to have a play. To get you started, here are a couple of examples:

• Programming Perl
• No country for old men

Sime, Frrr Brrr Scottish Play

Frrr Brrr Scottish Play is a slide deck by Peter Sime, showing how FRBR handles Macbeth and its numerous related Works, Expressions, and so on.

public-lld: Domain modelling and FRBR/FRSAD

Domain modeling and FRBR/FRSAD, from Jeff Young, on the public-lld mailing list of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, is heavy on the RDF (“From a domain modeling/OWL POV, Group1, Group2 and Group3 are pretty clearly associated with frsad:Thema by UML generalization/rdfs:subClassOf relationship”) but check out the diagram that’s attached, and the follow-up messages, for some interesting stuff. The RDF is in Turtle, not XML, so it’s more readable.

Have you been trying RDA Online?

Test accounts for RDA Online were set up and log information sent around a couple of weeks ago. Have you tried it? The offer is open until the end of August. I had a short look, but I’ll go back for a longer look and post about it. I didn’t try doing anything with workflows, which is the most important part of it all.

Summers, Libraries and Linked Data: Confessions of a Graph Addict

Ed Summers (who works at the Library of Congress in the United States) gave a talk on 24 June 2010 at a preconference session on linked data before the American Library Association conference: Libraries and Linked Data: Confessions of a Graph Addict. I don’t know what he said, but Summers used something I posted here in 2007 about Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in part. Glad it was useful!

Murray and Tillett, From Moby-Dick To Mashups: Thinking About Bibliographic Networks

Four days later, on 28 June (and you’ll see this mentioned in the previous slides), Ronald J. Murray and Barbara Tillett (both also at the Library of Congress) were talking at the ALA convention proper: From Moby-Dick to Mashups: Thinking About Bibliographic Networks (25.3 MB PDF).

Summary: Traditional and contemporary attempts to identify and describe simple and complex bibliographic resources have overlooked useful and powerful possibilities, due to the insufficient modeling of “bibliographic things of interest.” The presentation will introduce a resource description approach that remodels and strengthens FRBR by borrowing key concepts from Information Science and the History of Science. The presentation will reveal portions of a network of bibliographic (and other useful) relationships between printings of Melville?s novel dating from 1851-1975 into the present. In addition, structural similarities between the print publication network and the multimedia “mash-ups” seen on YouTube and other websites will be demonstrated and discussed.

Slide 2 says: “EXPECT THIS: FRBR requires remodeling and generalization to improve its comprehensibility, and to better inform information system design and implementation … Remodeling FRBR requires the addition of a Resource entity.”

There are slides titled The Discreet Charm of the Hierarchy, too.

Another open-bibliography thread

More verbs. Electronic ‘Items’ (Yes, another FRBR thread) kicks off, yes, another FRBR thread on the open-bibliography mailing list. Karen Coyle says: “FRBR basically solidifies the traditional library catalog card view, which may be why so many of us are having a hard time with it.”

PIFF cites this blog

PIFF posted a blog entry citing and discussing The FRBR Blog: FRBR citation.

Despite this blogs simple layout it is a pain to navigate around, if only because there is so much of it. The normally useful navigation bar on the left hand side has been packed with so much information, as well as the standard blog stuff, that it takes a while find something unless you already know exactly where it is. With that said, the information on the navigation bar is really quite useful, offering links to web documents, books and other sites all to help with the understanding of FRBR. The content of the blog itself is just as impenetrable as FRBR …

Hello there. This is really Last Month in FRBR. Sorry about that. I was on vacation for a week and what with one thing and another I let a couple of extra weeks pass by. Here are some nice things I’ve missed.

ELAG 2010: Workshop on FRBR and Identifiers

One of the workshops at the ELAG 2010 conference was “Discovery Interfaces 2: FRBR and Identifiers,” led by Janifer Gatenby of OCLC:

Resource discovery relies on persistent and well diffused identifiers. Related to discovery is access and rights management and they too rely on persistent identifiers. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the identifiers that relate to resources and their creators and how well they fit the FRBR model. What proactive roles should libraries be playing in relation to identifiers, their maintenance and diffusion?

Many identifiers will be considered. Among those at the work level are the ISTC (International standard text code), OWI (OCLC work identifier), ISWC (Musical works), ISAN (Audio-visual works) and OWI. At the manifestation level there are ISBN, ISSN, ISMN (music) v-ISAN, DOI, Handle, ARK, LC and other national bibliography identifiers and the OCN (OCLC control number). For creators, there is the new draft International standard ISNI and the emergent ORCID (Open Research Contributor Identifier).

Tasks for the workshop will include examining the existing identifier landscape and its completeness, examining the role of identifiers in discovery and in linking data.

Slides are up: Workshop on FRBR and Identifiers (PDF). Confusingly there are no names mentioned anywhere in so I don’t know who did what.

If you’re at all interested in identifiers for Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Persons and other group 2 entities, subjects, and so on, then you should read this. There are 60 slides, with lots of diagrams, and though it may be hard to get the full sense of it all, you’ll get the basics, lots of acronyms that you can pursue on your own if you don’t know them, some good links, some basic facts, some discussion of linked data, and a good sense of the issues. Have a look.

ALCTS FRBR Interest Group met last week

One week ago today the ALCTS FRBR Interest Group met. Jenn Riley, Yin Zhang, and Martha Yee spoke. I hope recordings or slides or notes go up.

OverCat from LibraryThing and TimSpalding

Tim Spalding announced OverCat, “LibraryThing’s new index of 32 million library records, assembled from libraries around the world … [it] combines results into edition-level clusters, so you get one result per edition (rather than pages and pages of the same edition of the same book from different libraries).”

When I first read that I though they were doing Expression-level groupings, which would be fantastic, but it’s Manifestation-level. Which is great but not fantastic. Nevertheless, it’s more good work from LibraryThing. The sad news is that they’ve harvested data from libraries but due to license restrictions they can’t make their aggregate improved data available.

TSIG pre-conference day on RDA

Shaping Tomorrow’s Metadata with RDA was the name of a full-day session held by the Canadian Library Association’s Technical Services Interest Group the day before the CLA’s 2010 annual conference. There’s some general stuff on RDA but also Pat Riva (chair of the FRBR Review Group) and Tom Delsey (who helped write the FRBR spec) speaking about things, and Jennifer Bowen of Rochester talking about the eXtensible Catalog, which will know about FRBR.

Bibliographica

Bibliographica “is an open catalogue of cultural works that grew out of the Public Domain Works project which started in 2005 and is still running today. The Bibliographica software that powers this site is open-source and designed for others to use. Moreover, different bibliographica instances can co-operatively share information. Other significant features include native RDF support, FRBR-like domain model, and wiki-like recording of every change.”

Taylor, FRBR in Practice — Visit Report

FRBR in Practice — Visit Report by Wendy Taylor, asks (and I quote in full, but go there and follow up):

A colleague and I were recently awarded an Ulverscroft/IFLA Best Practice Award to visit the Celia Library for the Visually Impaired in Helsinki to study their implementation of FRBR. We both work for the RNIB National Library Service so were really interested to find out how Celia use FRBR to assign relationships between different accessible formats of the same work. I’ve read lots about FRBR and have attended many presentations but to actually see it being used in practice and have a go myself was a real revelation. Celia produce many of their audio and Braille books in both Finnish and Swedish so the expression entity is particularly useful for them. Here at the RNIB we have can have several different formats (Braille, giant print, audio) all produced potentially from different editions of the same print work so it would be logical for us to have single record for the work with different manifestations attached.

Does anyone else out there use FRBR? I’d love to hear how you find it.

Oliver, FRBR and RDA: Advances in Resource Description

FRBR and RDA: Advances in Resource Description for Multiple Format Resources, by Chris Oliver.

It’s from 2009 but I just heard about it through Resource Shelf.

Weinheimer, New Possibilities in Cooperative Cataloging

New Possibilities in Cooperative Cataloging by James Weinheimer is a blog post made of an e-mail he sent to a mailing list I’d never heard of:

It still has never been shown that the FRBR user tasks have anything that *our users* want, (in fact, the FRBR displays I have seen tend to frighten even me!) although I will agree that FRBR may give librarians and catalogers a few of the tools that they want. So, the “FRBR user tasks” should probably be renamed the “FRBR librarian tasks”. As an example, I have mentioned several times on other lists that FRBR-type views will not help my patrons find much of anything, and I must confess, they don’t help me find anything I want either.

VuFind and “other editions” with xISBN

Lorcan Dempsey’s A web-siting at Yale: other editions and xISBN points out that at Yale’s VuFind catalogue they’re using VuFind’s ability to call on xISBN to generate a list of other editions of a given book, or, more generally, other Manifestations of a given Work. Example: The Hobbit.

York University Libraries, where I work, uses VuFind, but we turned off Other Editions before we launched in January. There were two main reasons. First, in a lot of cases there was no difference between Similar Items and Other Editions. The Hobbit example shows this. (Similar Items has little logic behind it—it’s pulling results from a keyword search based on the title of the item being displayed, if I remember right. With an interesting title it gives good results; often it just shows other editions of the same book.)

Second, because it used ISBNs, Other Editions only worked on books published from 1970 on. York University has many things published before 1970. Looking at those books showed no Other Editions even if we did have more recent Manifestations. Conversely, looking at Manifestations that did have ISBNs never showed the pre-1970 editions of the same Work. For example, this edition from 1961 has no links to Other Editions, and would never show up in any other book’s Other Editions list.

I realize that this can get a lot better through the use of OCLC and LC numbers. xISBN is a very useful service. VuFind’s use of it may be a lot better than it was late last year; I haven’t checked.

That said, the implementation in place when we deployed VuFind wasn’t good enough for an academic library. The way xISBN was used misled users about what other editions of a given work were available. It did not properly collocate. I meant to post about this at the time, but it slipped my mind. If we bring it back, I’ll post about it. There’s great promise here, but Weak FRBRization is inadequate for a research library.

Miksa, An Alternate Model of Functionality

Shawne Miksa sets out a new bibliographic model:

open-bibliography mailing list

open-bibliography is the mailing list for the Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. (Consider joining if open bibliographic data is an interest.) There was some FRBR talk on the list this week.

• Is FRBR Too Complicated? asked William Waites, and a few people said yes, including
• Rob Styles, who pointed out Bringing FRBR Down to Earth
• “It seems increasingly useless,” says James Weinheimer.

The remarkable and ubiquitous Karen Coyle said “what it comes down to for me is that the Group1 entities are really a single entity with subparts” and expanded her email message into a blog post: FRBR and Sharability.

Christopher Gutteridge said he would like good FRBR Examples. This led to more discussion, with Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding saying LibraryThing has already got it working and “what’s needed is doing.” Karen Coyle pointed out the FRBR cataloguer scenarios on the DCMI web site.

Check the archives for all of it. Really there’s nothing too new about it, though. The same kind of discussion has happened on other mailing list, with mostly the same people. Which is perhaps more important than the substance of this discussion.

Free access to RDA from June to August: get it while you can

COMPLIMENTARY OPEN-ACCESS PERIOD shouts a page at the Resource Description and Access web site: “The contents of the RDA Toolkit will be open at no charge for everyone to try from the RDA launch date in mid-June 2010 through August 31, 2010. Sign up now and we’ll send you an email with your login information as soon as open access becomes available in mid-June.”

This really has nothing to do with open access. RDA costs money: $195 USD for one person for one year; $325 USD for one year for a site license with multiple users but only one accessing the system at a time. Open access means it’s free. This is a free trial period of a commercial product designed, I think, to entice customers and to help work out bugs.

I think RDA is a standard should be freely available to the entire world. That said, if you’re at all interested, especially if you don’t think you’ll have access to it when they charge a subscription fee, now is the time to try it out. RDA is built on FRBR (and it seems, from what little I know, that it will be a very interesting online system), so you’ll want to try it out.

Gemberling, Thema and FRBR’s Third Group

Thema and FRBR’s Third Group, by Ted Gemberling (DOI: 10.1080/01639371003745413) is in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 48:5.

For more on “thema” and “nomen,” read about FRSAD and last year’s Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD): A Conceptual Model, a companion to FRBR.

Abstract: The treatment of subjects by Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) has attracted less attention than some of its other aspects, but there seems to be a general consensus that it needs work. While some have proposed elaborating its subject categories—concepts, objects, events, and places—to increase their semantic complexity, a working group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has recently made a promising proposal that essentially bypasses those categories in favor of one entity, thema. This article gives an overview of the proposal and discusses its relevance to another difficult problem, ambiguities in the establishment of headings for buildings.

RDA: 10-week Reading Program

RDA: 10-week reading program is just what it says it is. It’s week eight and I just found out about it! Sorry not to have posted about it before. Week 1 is the start. The only name on this is “Henry;” I have no clue beyond that who’s behind this.

Learning About RDA

Lots of mentions of FRBR et al on the Learning About RDA blog. There is a variety of writers, I think from a course at a library school who are doing this as part of their work.

University of Colorado at Boulder brushes up on FRBR

Brushing Up on FRBR describes how the 35 cataloguers at the University of Colorado at Boulder are reading and studying FRBR together!

They did it in a really interesting way, using digress.it to allow people to comment on each and every paragraph of the report. For example, here’s the definition of Expression, and discussion about it. It looks like there aren’t a whole lot of comments online, but I bet there was quite a bit of discussion in person. I hope it was a fruitful project.

Thirty-five cataloguers talking about FRBR — you know that’s going to be fun!

Panel participants wanted at ALCTS FRBR Interest Group

This hit various mailing lists:

Request for panel participants, ALCTS FRBR Interest Group
ALA Annual, Washington, D.C., Friday, June 25, 2010, 10:30-12:00 p.m.

The ALCTS FRBR Interest Group is seeking participants/presenters for a panel discussion on FRBR, its implications and implementations. All topics related to FRBR are welcome, but given the imminent release of RDA we are most interested in exploring issues other than descriptive cataloging. Some suggested topics include:

• implications for user interface design and implementation;
• FRBRoo and the CIDOC CRM;
• FRAD and FRSAD;
• overview and background on data modeling in general

Presentations should be brief, around 10-15 minutes, to allow for discussion time after the presentations. Please send a brief description of your proposed presentation by May 24, to our contact information below.

Thanks for your consideration,

Tami Morse McGill
Chair, ALCTS FRBR Interest Group
Catalog Librarian
University of Wyoming Libraries
tmorsemc@uwyo.edu
tamimcgill@gmail.com

Judy Jeng
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect, ALCTS FRBR Interest Group
judyjeng@comcast.net

OCLC raises limits on free access to xISBN and xISSN

Karen Coombs posted Daily noncommercial usage limits raised for xISBN and xISSN on the OCLC Developer Network Blog. Now you can do 1,000 queries a day, even if you’re just a regular person, and not affiliated with a library that’s got the right permissions with them. Well done, OCLC!

Riley, What Do You Want Out of a FRBRized Data Service

Jenn Riley asked What do you want out of a FRBRized data web service? on the code4lib mailing list Tuesday.

At Indiana University we’re working on a project that will help us see concretely what FRBRized [1] library data and discovery systems might look like. [2] One of our project goals is to share the raw FRBRized data widely so that others can look at it to see how it’s structured, reuse it, improve on it, comment on the FRBRization effectiveness, etc. We’re planning on allowing remote/Web Services/API/SRU/some machine-to-machine method like that access to the data. As we’re starting to think about how we should set that up, we thought it would be useful to gather some use cases from the code4lib community, as it’s the folks here that are experimenting services like this. So if there were FRBRized data available to you (at least for FRBR group 1 and group 2 entities; *maybe* group 3 as well), what would you do with it? What kinds of questions would your service (discovery system, whatever) ask a service that made this data available? What kinds of information would you want in a response? Would you have uses that called for downloading of “all” data at once or would you instead be better off with real-time queries to a web service? It’s questions like that we’re interested in brainstorming with this group about.

Read the rest of the thread for follow-up discussion.

David Bigwood, FRBR a Dead End?

David Bigwood posted FRBR a Dead End? on his cataloguing blog Catalogablog about cataloguing. He’d been to a conference and came away thinking: “One thing that hit me over the head was that FRBR might be a poor model for our data.” Read the comments, from Shawne Miksa, Jonathan Rochkind, Ed Summers, Ross Singer, and some other usual suspects.

Dueber and Rochkind on data models

There was a long thread on ngc4lib that got into a discussion of data models with a lot about FRBR coming up, but I can’t find it in the archives. I can still point to some related blog posts that came out the mailing list talk, though:

• Jonathan Rochkind, Serialization vs Metadata Schema/Vocabulary: “RDA _theoretically_ uses FRBR (rather than ISBD) as the referenced ‘metadata schema’. This to my mind is actually the _most important_ part of RDA, the problem is that the RDA effort didn’t really realize how important and how challenging this was, they didn’t really realize what it entailed, and didn’t take it seriously — perhaps until fairly recently.”
• Bill Dueber, Data Structures and Serializations: “Anyone advocating or dismissing a data model based on the data structure or serialization most-often associated with that model is missing the goddamn point.”

ELAG workshop on FRBR, June in Helsinki

Discovery interfaces 2: FRBR and identifiers working group, a workshop by Jennifer Gatenby, is scheduled for the European Library Automation Group’s 2010 conference in Helsinki in June. I hope this gets recorded, or at least that slides go up.

Resource discovery relies on persistent and well diffused identifiers. Related to discovery is access and rights management and they too rely on persistent identifiers. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the identifiers that relate to resources and their creators and how well they fit the FRBR model. What proactive roles should libraries be playing in relation to identifiers, their maintenance and diffusion?

Many identifiers will be considered. Among those at the work level are the ISTC (International standard text code), OWI (OCLC work identifier), ISWC (Musical works), ISAN (Audio-visual works) and OWI. At the manifestation level there are ISBN, ISSN, ISMN (music) v-ISAN, DOI, Handle, ARK, LC and other national bibliography identifiers and the OCN (OCLC control number). For creators, there is the new draft International standard ISNI and the emergent ORCID (Open Research Contributor Identifier).

Tasks for the workshop will include examining the existing identifier landscape and its completeness, examining the role of identifiers in discovery and in linking data.

Carol ?, MARC, FRBR, and a Whole New World

From MARC, FRBR and a Whole New World, a blog post from someone probably named Carol.

Recently after a very basic copy cataloging course, a student asked me if it was ok if she added the electronic version of an item to the bibliographic record for the print, even when they are not exactly the same edition. This is not the first time this question has come up and I doubt it will be the last. I told her that technically, no. This is not sanctioned by The Powers That Be. However, if it works in her library catalog and the patrons like it and the other librarians like it – why not? I emphasized that this would be a Big No-No if she was adding the record to OCLC or selling it but if it is in her library, in her catalog, she can do whatever she needs to do to help her patrons – this is pretty much the point of the catalog.

… At an ALA session in the recent few years (I think it was 2008 Anaheim), John Estes from VTLS stood up and spoke of “super” records. It was the most brilliant thing I’d heard from an established ILS in a very long time. He demonstrated how they basically ‘bumped’ up the generic data that applied across all instances of an item and then hooked the non-generic information to it in a cool way. To put it in FRBR terms, they create an Expression then hook the Manifestations to it (with the Items hooked to the Manifestations). BRILLIANT! This would solve the dilemma of ‘how do I connect my electronic and print versions into one record?’.

Knowledge Integration

I’m not sure what’s going on at http://developer.k-int.com/svn/default/sandbox/frbr_rel_model/trunk/src/main/java/org/frbr/datamodel/ … except that it’s a FRBR datamodel defined in Java, stored in Subversion, wrapped in an enigma, and covered in a delicious milk chocolate coating.

Krichel, Introduction to Knowledge Organization

Thomas Krichel is teaching LIS 512, Introduction to Knowledge Organization, at Long Island University. The second week in January was about FRBR. Getting things off to a good start!

McGrath, Looking for advice for project to tranform MARC bib data into work records

Kelley McGrath sent Looking for advice for project to tranform MARC bib data into work records to the code4lib mailing list last week. (If you think mailing lists are dead and everything happens on blogs, you’re wrong.)

I am hoping someone can help me with my current conundrum. I am looking for recommendations for tools and methods for a project I am working on to try to implement some of the Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC) work on FRBR works and moving images (http://www.olacinc.org/drupal/?q=node/27). I am not a programmer or coder, but we are going to have to hire someone to do this and give them some direction. So I am interested in what tools you would recommend for this purpose and why, as well as any other advice anyone can give me.

Basically what we want to do is take a large number of MARC bibliographic records for moving images, extract the information that might describe the FRBR Work and parse and normalize it. We then want to use this data to create provisional Work records. I am not so worried about getting the data out of MARC, but about how to work with the data once it’s out. I have listed the main steps we anticipate needing in broad outlines below.

Check the thread to see the replies; drop McGrath a note if you can help.

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative news

The March 2010 status report from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is a nice update. I admire projects that do updates like this. There’s some FRBR and FRAD news because of the Resource Description and Access work being done.

DCMI/RDA Task Group

The DCMI RDA Task Group has continued to be busy finalizing the registration of the RDA Element sets and vocabularies. The completion date has been postponed to the first half of 2010 following the rescheduled release date of June 2010 for RDA, to be called the RDA Toolkit. The Task Group is currently discussing the generalization of RDA elements for use by the wider community.

“RDA vocabularies: process, outcome, use” by Diane Hillmann, Karen Coyle, Jon Phipps, and Gordon Dunsire was published in D-Lib Magazine vol.16 no.1/2 (January/February 2010). It describes some of the challenges encountered in the registration work and the solutions adopted.

Jon Phipps, Karen Coyle and Diane Hillmann gave a presentation on application profiles to the ALCTS (Association for Library Collections & Technical Services) Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) on January 18, 2010 during its Midwinter Meeting. The presentation used the Task Group work to illustrate various points.

Diane Hillmann continues to represent DCMI on the advisory board of the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF) project. The first versions of the VMF matrix were released in November 2009. The matrix is a tool for automatically computing best-fit mappings between bibliographic metadata elements, and consists of RDF triples in the TTL format representing around 2,500 role and 11,500 relator concepts, with over 800 terms mapped from third-party vocabularies including RDA and Dublin Core. The matrix and further information about VMF are available here. Gordon Dunsire is a member of the core project team.

The Task Group continues to liaise with the the FRBR Review Group which maintains the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) models. The Review Group is discussing a draft registration of the entity-relationship model of FRBR.

Work has started on the registration of the FRAD model. The Task Group will discuss mapping the FRBR and FRAD elements used by RDA, and registered as part of the RDA element sets, with the FRBR and FRAD element sets when their registration is finalized.

Tillett, RDA Changes from AACR2 for Texts

Barbara Tillett’s webcast Library of Congress talk RDA Changes from AACR for Texts was done on 12 January 2010 but I just found out about it these week, thanks to a mention from Ed Summers.

As the United States begins to prepare to test the new cataloging code, RDA: Resource Description and Access, this presentation explores the changes from AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed.) that the new code brings. The focus of this presentation is a brief overview of the changed instructions for cataloging textual materials. The presentation lasts 41 minutes, and the Q&A session afterward runs 35 minutes.

Resource Description and Access in South Africa, 2009

On the RDA-L mailing list Pat Riva pointed out Resource Description and Access in South Africa, a one-day conference in July 2009. The opening talk is by Robert Maxwell, who wrote FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed, and then a talk about FRBR by Madely du Preez and one about FRAD by Fiona Bell.