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).

Calendar

November 2005
M T W T F S S
« Oct   Dec »
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  

15 November 2005

Student FRBR paper

Filed under: Papers — William Denton @ 7:26 am

Andystardust has posted a paper he wrote about FRBR at library school. He says FRBR “has been the most interesting aspect of” his Organization of Knowledge class. “By far.”

Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, for example, has been published many times since its original appearance in 1963. The edition that is currently available at Amazon, the Del Rey Impact trade paperback, is one manifestation. Likewise, Nicholas Roeg’s film has been released in various media over the years, including the VHS format, laserdisc and DVD. Even within the DVD format, there exist two separate releases of the film: one by Anchor Bay Entertainment, the other by Criterion. Each of these releases represents a separate manifestation of the broader work.

It is worth noting that, in terms of the cataloging of materials for use in library systems, most bibliographic records refer to a manifestation of a work and stop there. But a manifestation, like an expression or a work, is still an abstract conceptual entity. In an online catalog maintained by a bibliographic network like ILCSO, for example, a bibliographic record for the Criterion Collection edition of Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth is only a surrogate for that manifestation, copies of which may be held in libraries throughout the system. In order to refer to a specific copy of the Criterion edition, FRBR suggests the use of the word item.

Manifestations are “the physical embodiment of an expression of a work” so he’s a bit off on that one. In his example, the manifestation would be the complete set of all copies of the Criterion release of The Man Who Fell to Earth. I’m not a cataloguer, but from what I remember of integrated library systems, the one the cataloguer had in hand — an item — would be an examplar of the manifestation, the catalogue record would describe the manifestation, and each item going out to the libraries in the system would have information of its own associated with the record, such as which branch has it and perhaps who has it checked out.