The FRBR Blog

Further to the previous entry, the Library of Congress has a (small) page collecting their work on MARC and FRBR.

The Library of Congress made a FRBR Display Tool,

The FRBR Display Tool works with flat files of MARC unit records. It first generates a MARCXML document using the MARCXML Toolkit. It then transforms the MARCXML data into an XML encoded FRBR structure that uses selected MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)) elements. Both XSLT 1.0 and portions of XSLT 2.0 standards are used to do most of the grouping of bibliographic items into the FRBR “Work, “Expression” and “Manifestation” entities. An HTML display is then generated from the FRBR XML document using an XSL stylesheet. The user of the FRBR Display Tool may alter the matching and sorting specifications in the XSLT components to accommodate characteristics of local data and change the XSL display stylesheet to reflect local display preferences.

The default HTML output used in the FRBR Display Tool links to the individual manifestations’ Library of Congress OPAC record using URLs that query the ILS. This linking mechanism may be changed so that the resulting display links to individual institutions’ online catalogs by modifying the FRBR XML-to-HTML stylesheet. Batch programs are packaged with the tool that provide a command line interface to it on a user’s computer. The only requirement is to have at least version 1.4 of the Java runtime environment installed.

I haven’t tried it, but if you have, please leave a comment.

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly Vol. 39 Nos. 3-4 (2004) is a FRBR special . Patrick Le Boeuf, of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the IFLA FRBR Review Group, edited it and wrote one of the papers, and there are others by Barbara Tillett, Glenn Patton, and more. Don’t miss it.

Thom Hickey is chief scientist at OCLC, and in his blog Outgoing he often discusses FRBR. Here are some posts he made recently:

• More FRBR workshop, identifiers, etc.
• FRBR statistics
• Exchanging FRBR information (includes his presentation)
• Flat files, which gives a bit of the scoop on the Beowulf cluster they set up and used for some FRBR work

What started me on all this was a paper I wrote in 2003 for a course at library school, FRBR and Fundamental Cataloguing Rules.

FRBR in 21st Century Catalogues: An Invitational Workshop took place at OCLC headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, from 2-4 May 2005. The program and presentations are online. It was a very interesting and thought-provoking workshop which inspired me to start this weblog.

Jenn Riley had a great time at the 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.

Further to yesterday’s mention of Christine Oliver’s talk, here’s useful stuff from a talk she gave at the 2003 Canadian <Metadata> Forum on 19 September 2003:

• Text of the slides, with notes
• PDF of the slides
• PDF of the slides, with notes
• RealAudio stream of the talk

With all that, you can just close your eyes and imagine you’re there.

The Manitoba Library Association NewsLine gives detailed coverage to a talk by Christine Oliver, chair of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing: Navigating the Library Catalogue: How FRBR Helps Our Users, given on 4 May 2005. A comment was added saying, “This was one of the best FRBR sessions that I’ve attended and Christine Oliver gave us really up-to-the-minute information.” Unfortunately, neither the text of the talk nor any slides are available on conference web site.

The original 1998 final report on FRBR from IFLA, which describes the whole thing.