The FRBR Blog

There will be no posts here this week. Next week I’ll catch up with all the exciting FRBR goings-on around the world. Stay calm. Be brave. Wait for the signs.

Back in July I mentioned that University of Alabama students in Steven L. MacCall’s course, The Organization of Information, were blogging critiques of readings, and some were FRBRy. The course is on again, and new critiques are going up:

• On Patrick Le Boeuf’s FRBR: Hype or Cure-All?
• On a paper by Barbara Tillett

What mailing lists have discussion about FRBR? I know of two, the main FRBR mailing list (of course), and AUTOCAT (for cataloguers), and a Google search for mention of FRBR on Usenet led me to the archives of the Music Library Association’s mailing list (music librarians having to deal with work, expression, and so on every day). Also, the Semantic Web Interest Group talks about it. Are there are any others? Leave a comment if you recommend one.

• FRBR mailing list
• AUTOCAT
• MLA-L
• Semantic Web Interest Group

From Jenn Riley’s Sunday posting, The next big thing in searching?:

Discussions of FRBR displays frequently talk about presenting Expressions with a language for textual items, with a director for film, or with a performer for music, allowing users to select the Expression most useful to them before viewing Manifestations. What’s missing is how the system knows what bits of information would be relevant for distinguishing between Expressions, since these bits of information will be different for different types of materials, and sometimes even with similar types of materials. We have a ways to go before the type of system I’m imagining reaches maturity.

I’ve mentioned the frbr tag at Technorati, but Google’s new blog search gizmo is far better at finding mentions of our beloved FRBR on weblogs: try http://www.google.com/blogsearch?q=frbr. Modestly, I note that it’s jammed with posts from here. To filter them out, use http://www.google.com/blogsearch?q=frbr+-site:frbr.org.

Google, as you undoubtedly know, has been doing big things and seems to have plans for massive projects. The FRBR world is thinking about how to handle digital objects, complicated aggregates like web sites, and so on. What if Google started using FRBR concepts to shape how they organize information? I don’t know what they’d do, but by Jupiter it’d be interesting. And if they exposed an API so that other people could use it, who knows what would emerge. Leave a comment with a suggestion or idea, if you have one.

(Of course, any other search engine, or the Internet Archive, or Amazon.com, could have an equally interesting effect.)

I don’t read Italian, either, but it looks like Patrick Le Boeuf has a FRBRish paper in a publication of the Associazione Italiana Biblioteche.

Erik Stattins’s Furbur och Amazon - Drutten och Jena, a blog entry from last Wednesday, is in Swedish (I think). It was prompted by another blogger writing about books and ISBNs. Even if you don’t read Swedish, however, you’ll recognize the diagram. He links to a paper by Marcus Westlind, Den senaste utvecklingen inom katalogisering och dess påverkan av ny teknologi (PDF) which I also can’t read but looks very interesting.

Richard Newman has a work in progress on his site: The FRBR, the Semantic Web, and Image Annotation. Unfortunately, the bit where he describes how FRBR fits in isn’t written yet! But read it anyway, and then keep an eye on it. He asks for comments, too.

There was a burst of activity on the mailing list this week, which is noteworthy, but a special mention should be made because those of you with tight spam filters may have missed it. One of my filters intercepted it all because it looked like a person sending mail directly from their home connection, which is usually trouble: host107-3.inist.fr looks like a consumer broadband machine (host107-3 matches 193.54.107.3). I assume this will be corrected soon, but if your filters are catching the list traffic too, you’ll need to either turn off the filter or whitelist the address.