The FRBR Blog

There are two important things everyone should know about, and I’ll add links to them on the left-hand side.

First, there’s the FRBR mailing list. It hasn’t been seeing much traffic this year, but what’s there is always interesting. A (slightly out-of-date) PDF of the archives is available to anyone, and if you join the list you can see everything.

Second, and also looked after by Patrick Le Boeuf, is the FRBR bibliography. There’s a thirty-nine page PDF there that lists all FRBR-related publications up to late October 2004. To stay even more on top of things, you can grab this always current RTF version of the bibliography, which right now is forty-three pages long and was updated a couple of weeks ago. If you’re doing any research on FRBR, that’s the place to start. It has full citations for sources in many different languages.

Both of those links are on the FRBR Review Group’s web site, which is linked on the left, but I want to point them out specially. I myself hadn’t looked at the bibliography in a while and hadn’t realized how large it had become. It’s a great resource.

While this blog is getting going, I’ll catch up on earlier discussions of FRBR around the web and on blogs. Here’s one from Karen G. Schneider’s Free Range Librarian blog from 12 November 2004: Going FRBRish.

Went to a CLA preconference today on FRBR, and drank the KoolAid! I so get it. From the cataloger’s point of view, it is nice and tidy. From the public service point of view, FRBR (or things FRBRish, such as RedLightGreen) is absolutely the best thing to happen to the library catalog since the invention of the book.

The Australian Committee on Cataloguing had a seminar on 2 February 2004 called Revolution or Evolution? The Impact of FRBR. The presentations, and a couple of papers, are online:

• Barbara Tillett, The FRBR Model (PowerPoint)
• Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC and FRBR: Directions and Research Results (PowerPoint)
• Marie-Louise Ayres, Case Studies in Implementing FRBR: AustLit and MusicAustralia (Word)
• Bemal Rajapatirana, Testing FRBR Against the National Bibliographic Database (Word) and The Application of FRBR in a National Bibliographic Database (PowerPoint)

VTLS, a vendor of of library software, has worked FRBR into their products. Here are some related links from their site:

• July 2002’s press release VTLS Inc. Announces FRBR Implementation
• Twelve PowerPoint presentations with lots of screenshots
• Table of contents of FRBR Cataloging User’s Guide

Jenn Riley, at her Inquiring Librarian blog, mentions FRBR and reactions to it in an entry called Coming Out of the Woodwork:

I’ve been noticing lately just how progressive librarians are. It gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside every time I see evidence of this phenomenon.

FRBR is a good example. A colleague of mine recently described FRBR as a “religion,” and I think that’s not entirely untrue. But I’m increasingly seeing rank-and-file librarians (not just us “digital” folks or special collections librarians who do things “differently” anyways, according to one popular perception) show an interest in it.

Patrick Le Boeuf announced today that the report on and conclusions from FRBR in 21st Century Catalogues: An Invitational Workshop are now available. It gives summaries of what was discussed, and at the bottom are the conclusions.

Here are links to the PowerPoint slides for the talks given at the workshop:

• Ed O’Neill, Relational Models for Aggregates
• Maja Žumer, Modelling Augmentations
• Judith A. Kuhagen, Modelling Continuing Resources in FRBR
• Carol van Nuys and Ketil Albertsen, Modelling Web Resources
• Allyson Carlyle, FRBR: Challenges to Implementation in AACR2, with Some Attention to Non-Book Materials
• Barbara Tillett, Relationships in FRBR
• Maja Žumer, Some Outcomes of the CRM/FRBR Harmonization: The Definition of Manifestation and a Review of Attributes
• Glenn Patton, FRANAR: Extending FRBR Concepts to Authority Data
• Marcia Lei Zeng and Athena Salaba, Toward an International Sharing and Use of Subject Authority Data
• Diane Vizine-Goetz, Subjects in Fiction: The Experience with WorldCat
• Maria Nasiłowska, Precoordination in Subject Indexing Systems and FRBR
• Trond Aalberg, Formats and FRBR Catalogues — Where’s Our Focus?
• Ketil Albertsen, What Do We Want to Identify? FRBR and Identifier Semantics
• Patrick Le Boeuf, Identifying “Textual Works:” ISTC: Controversy and Potential
• Thomas Hickey, Exchanging FRBR Information
• Barbara Tillett, FRBR and Cataloguing Rules: Impact on IFLA’s Statement of Principles and AACR3
• Patrick Le Boeuf, Convergence is the Goal: Activity Report of the IFLA FRBR/CIDOC CRM Harmonization Group
• Godfrey Rust, Thoughts from a Different Planet

Lorcan Dempsey, vice president and chief strategist of OCLC, mentions OCLC’s xISBN service, which is used in their FRBR bookmarklet.

Some FRBR talks were given at the 2004 conference of the ALCTS (Association for Library Collections and Technical Services), and they are included on this list of all conference presentations. The actual name of the event was “Back to the Future: Understanding the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records Model (FRBR) and its Impact on Users, OPACS, and Knowledge Organization Preconference.”

Here are direct links to PDFs of the presentation slides:

• FRBR: Coming Soon to YOUR Library?, Jennifer Bowen, University of Rochester
• FRBR and the Bibliographic Universe, or, How to Read FRBR as a Model, Allyson Carlyle, Information School, University of Washington
• Differentiating Libraries through Enriched User Searching; FRBR as the next dimension in meaningful Information Retrieval, Vinod Chachra, Chairman & CEO, VTLS Inc. and John Espley, Director of Design, VTLS Inc.
• Stepping Back Looking Forward: FRBR and the Evolution of the Catalogue,Thomas J. Delsey, Consultant
• RedLightGreen - FRBR between a Rock and a Hard Place. Merrilee Proffitt, Program Officer, RLG
• What is FRBR? (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, Library of Congress
• FictionFinder: a FRBR works-based prototype, Diane Vizine-Goetz, OCLC Research

OCLC has been doing lots of interesting work on FRBR, and it’s all listed on this page about their FRBR research activities.