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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7 July 2005

LibDB

Filed under: Implementations — William Denton @ 7:30 am

Morbus Iff’s LibDB is stalled because he got too busy, but it’s worth a look. If you’re a PHP hacker than you can contribute, and if not, you can just look at the table structure in the database and see how he laid things out. The home page says:

LibDB allows you to smartly and easily catalog your movies, books, magazines, comics, etc. into your own computerized “personal library”. It is a free, open sourced, library and asset management system based on and inspired by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (pdf), triples from the semantic web, and “the end-user doesn’t, and shouldn’t, need to know this stuff”.

It’s built on Drupal, an open source content management system. I got it installed on a FreeBSD system in about half an hour (that’s starting with installing PHP), and only had one small problem. I was getting this error:

# mysql -u drupal -p drupal < libdb/libdb.mysql
Enter password:
ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 24: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check
the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right
syntax to use near 'condition TEXT, treatment TEXT, scheduled_treatment
TEXT, access_restrictions TE' at line 1

I renamed the condition table to condition1 and it worked. It seemed to be a conflict between LibDB and MySQL 5, which thinks “condition” is a special reserved word.