A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.

Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.


Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.

Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).

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RedLightGreen example

Posted by: William Denton, 1 July 2005 8:00 am
Categories: Implementations,Vendors

Another example of FRBR in use: RLG uses the model in RedLightGreen. Go there and search on a book title, for example “the hound of the baskervilles”. You’ll get back:

1. Hound Of The Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Sir Doyle
258 editions published between 1901 and 2003 in 31 languages.
Primary Subject: Holmes Sherlock Fictitious Character – Fiction

2. Sign Of Four, by Arthur Conan Sir Doyle
253 editions published between 0 and 2002 in 16 languages.
Primary Subject: Holmes Sherlock Fictitious Character – Fiction

3. Hound Of The Baskervilles Another Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Sir Doyle
34 editions published between 1902 and 2001 in 2 languages.
Primary Subject: Holmes Sherlock Fictitious Character – Fiction

(Why so many non-Baskerville books show up, I don’t know.) Notice how in the first result, 258 editions published over 102 years, in 31 languages, are grouped together. In Under the Hood, they explain:

RLG needed a way to organize the vast number of records in the RLG Union Catalog without overwhelming users with a deluge of information about different editions. RLG turned to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), an emerging model proposed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. FRBR distinguishes between a work, its expressions (e.g. translations), manifestations of those expressions (specific editions), and items (specific copies). The RedLightGreen database collapses FRBR’s four levels into just two, displaying a work and various manifestations of that work. This approach will reduce a potentially overwhelming number of editions into a smaller, more manageable set of works that match a user’s search terms.