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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10 November 2005

NASIG Newsletter

Filed under: Conferences, Implementations — William Denton @ 7:46 am

I stumbled across this just a couple of days ago, though it’s from September: Does FRBR Include Serials? A FRBR Implementation for All Formats (scroll down to the middle), by Craig Thomas, a report on the spring 2005 meeting of the New England Technical Services Librarians, filed in the NASIG Newsletter (September 2005). John Espley from VTLS gave a demonstration of Virtua.

Of the design considerations addressed, it was likely the question of display that aroused the greatest interest, many attendees curious as to what FRBR records even look like. Espley demonstrated VTLS’s proposed solution to this design challenge using as an example Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. (Today’s demo was PowerPoint-based, rather than live). On the top half of the screen, Virtua’s split screen interface displays the work-expression-manifestation relationships within a family of records as an expandable tree structure indented according to the entity level. Distinctive icons denoting each level provide added clarity. On the bottom half of the screen appears the record corresponding to the point in the tree one is highlighting. Each record below the work level possesses both a control number (field 001) and an 004 linking field (appropriated from MARC 21 Holdings Field 004, Control Number for Related Bibliographic Record). The latter corresponds to the control number (001) of the record at the preceding level. Manifestations thus link to their respective expressions; expressions link to the work.