The FRBR Blog

Janet Ahrberg was at the combined Mountain Plains Library Association/Wyoming Library Association conference last week, and in this entry from the conference’s blog she’s all revved up about FRBR:

I especially enjoyed the Friday program “Reference Resource Sharing and FRBR: Why Should I Care.” Because of it, I’m going home with “FRBR” firmly implanted in my head. I will be checking out FBERized records on RedLightGreen and OCLC’s Fiction Finder databases. This PowerPoint presentation will soon be posted on the MPLA Website. I encourage you to check it out to learn more.

The medlib-l mailing list carried a call for proposals for the NASIG 2006 conference that lists, at the top, FRBR as a topic they’re interested in. You have until early November to get your proposal in.

Searching for FRBR on NASIG’s web site turns up 29 hits today, mostly conference and newsletter stuff.

Alexander Sigel dropped me some mail (which is always welcome) to point out something he’d put together when looking into topic maps and XTM: FRBR and XTM. Have a look, especially if you’re interested in RDF.

He suggested that perhaps FRBR had been discussed at TMRA 2005: International Workshop on Topic Map Research and Applications, but I didn’t see anything. If you know of something relevant, please let me know.

I can’t read this blog entry because it’s in Chinese. It mentions FRBR, MARC, the Semantic Web, and other things by name in English. Can anyone out there give us a sense of what it says?

Gordon Bonnar’s blog entry FRBR and RDF/XML shows how he uses Davis and Newman’s RDF schema for FRBR to describe Neal Stephenson‘s Quicksilver.

I think this is really interesting. Two people not from the library world put together a draft schema for FRBR in RDF, and weeks later another person is gluing it together with some other things so he can catalogue his home library. This is the start of something good.

What’s FRBR and Why Do I Care? covers an introductory talk Glenn Patton (from OCLC) gave at the Ohio Library Council‘s 2005 conference.

I remember in 1996 when the movie Harriet the Spy came out, there was the usual surge of interest in the book. Patron holds were spread across five different bib records: for the hardback book, the large print edition, and three different paperback editions. My tech services manager was kind of enough to bend the rules that summer and merge the records together, so everything was collapsed into a single hold queue.

That’s a situation that FRBR, or Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, is designed to address.

In “RDF and Me” [link deleted on 27 November 2009], Gordon Bonnar, a blogger in Ottawa, Canada, muses on using FRBR and RDF for his home library of books, music, and movies:

Take for example my book collection. With the work of Dublin Core, FRBR, and any other metadata schemas I am interested in it would be rather trivial to create an RDF store of my entire book collection. This could be easily indexed or combined with other book collections as well as searched, etc.

FRBR in RDF, a presentation by Ian Davis of Talis, given at the 2005 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications. It talks about the work he and Richard Newman and others have done, which I linked to recently in Expression of FRBR Concepts in RDF.

(Note: It’s a web slide show done with Eric Meyer’s S5, and to my surprise it made my Firefox get confused and I couldn’t load any other URL in that tab.)